Hey guys! I know I know, its been a while since I have been on here, life has been throwing all sorts of curve balls but I am here now, haha that’s what matters! I have missed ya’ll, and I hope everyone is doing well!

WOW where to even start?! Autumn is almost 8 months old, how crazy is that?? Its so crazy how fast time flies without asking for permission. In the words of the ever-so-wise and glorious Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Well, I have definitely been missing some of it, but now I am back to share with ya’ll what I’ve been learning despite my shortcomings and excessive busy-ness.

A little about Nick, he is going away for the whole month of October to do some field training in Yakima, Washington. He will be gone for my birthday, but I have grown used to it at this point. I think I am also getting to that point where I am realizing that birthdays are important, but aren’t like what they used to be when you are an adult, and honestly that is okay. It reminds me that God thought that the world really needed someone like me on this earth, but it no longer prompts me to have some sort of special, self-centered day where its all about me if that makes sense. I guess that’s what growing up does to you haha!

Other than that, Nick, Autumn, and I are just living our lives the best way we know how. We are going to Hawaii for a week with his family, so that should be a lot of fun. We will be leaving Autumn behind, so that will be hard for me I think, but I will have my mom to watch her and Facetime me every 5 minutes haha!

Life certainly has gotten more expensive to live (can we take a second to address food prices?! YIKES), but God has been so good to us and we are doing well.

In terms of personal growth, I am really starting to find my true self. I have been learning lately just how much I don’t know WHO I am. God has REALLY been forcing me to slow down, find joy in Him, and reflect on who I really am in Him. In other words, He has really been trying to get me to see who He made me to be. And boy, has it been eye-opening learning about ME haha!

Below I will list off some things I have really been learning about myself lately, things many of ya’ll may not know… things that I didn’t really know super well until I recognized them myself!

1. I HATE conflict. I avoid it like the plague. Any way… ANY WAY I can get out of it, I get out of it. It gives me severe anxiety, especially now post-partum. BUT, I have gotten better at confronting conflict. Maybe not much better, but better.
2. I try to resolve conflicts, I am a peace-maker at heart. I used to do it whenever my siblings were fighting which each other or my parents, and I still do it now.
3. When I am in a social setting and notice that the people there know each other already, I immediately become an introvert even though I am more in the middle between an introvert and an extrovert because I realize that I am the odd-one out (being the odd-one out is a recurring theme throughout my life and has caused me a great deal of trauma).
4. I am a people-pleaser. I seek to make connections any way I can because it makes me feel a part of something. When I feel a part of something, it boosts my self-esteem and gets rid of my main fear: being left out and ignored and made fun of.
5. I am not a huge sweets person, I love salty things.
6. I love anime, video games, and I am very interested in politics (I am right-leaning in my thought processes).
7. I love to write, but I don’t like to read. I do audiobooks whenever I can.
8. I am a deep thinker, REALLY deep thinker. English classes always excited me because I got to dig deep into themes, the time period, etc.
9. I love Jesus and studying His word, but I often struggle with my spirituality because I compare it to the spirituality of others. For example, if I see someone in church, raising their hands, dancing, going above in beyond during worship, it makes me uncomfortable and feel insecure because that’s not how I worship, and oftentimes I think, “should that be me?”
10. My talents are writing, speaking, dancing, and encouraging/being there for others. I love to tell stories, and come close to others in their time of need. But I have also had to learn that I need to set up good boundaries so that I don’t get taken advantage of, used, and manipulated (this is a work in progress).

These are just a few, but these are some key things that I have really learned about myself lately that I thought I would share. What happened to me in my life was this: I was often made fun of and belittled for who I was, and was always told that I needed to be something else other than myself. Now, I think there is a difference between being yourself, and being a BETTER self, so I will recognize that, but growing up, my skillset was never really taken seriously. Sure I accomplished some cool things in my life that got me some praise and recognition, but overall my talents were not seen as valuable. That is why I don’t write like I used to. That is why I don’t dance like I used to. That is why I get close to people, but have some barriers up because of past hurts. I never was really encouraged to know and embrace who I TRULY was.

Instead, I was told to achieve things. I was told to be better, do better, get a college degree because it was the only way I would be able to do anything in life. I was told that a journalism or writing degree “wouldn’t make me any money”, and that I needed to fabricate a new talent that would support me. Dancing? Worthless. Just a phase. It’s time to move on, I was told.

The only person in my life who saw my talents early, and encouraged me to pursue them every time I saw him was my Grandpa Murray. At one point, I thought it was annoying actually. He would insist on giving me articles, tell me to write about them, and send him my response. He even tried to get me to write a book called “The Mask”, a book about how people hide their real selves from the world, and the difficult consequences that come from hiding your true self from others, and yourself. He always wanted me to write because he knew it was my true talent. He didn’t see it the way others saw it. Others saw it as a hobby, a skill that wouldn’t amount to anything. He saw it as my destiny. He was the only one who encouraged me to see it as my genuine, God-given talent. He even did that with my dancing, because he knew I was good at that too. I will never forget that, and I will always treasure him for seeing my authentic self when no one else really did or cared to.

The problem was, I didn’t have enough people speaking the truth of who I really was, and what my talents really were to me. Instead, everyone wanted me to be someone else. Someone who did their hair differently. Someone who wasn’t so awkward, dorky, and weak. Someone who dressed differently, and pursued different hobbies and dreams than the ones God gave me.

And so, being eighteen and having a ground-zero self-esteem, I became the chameleon that I was told to be. I left my dancing teams, I pursued International Relations, got a job to help support myself, and that was that. Sure I still wrote in my classes, but it wasn’t the main focus like it should have been. Instead of honing the skill that God had clearly given to me, I chose to take on something else that I wasn’t really even into. I did learn a lot, and ended up finding my love for politics and international news through it, but was it what God really wanted me to do? Maybe it was so that I could come to this ground-breaking realization here and now, at this time and in this place. See, God’s hand is at work in our life ALWAYS, especially during the times where things seem all over the place, squandered, and lost. True intimacy with Jesus comes through the hardships, and rarely the good times.

At this point in my life, God has really been telling me to return to my talents, and use them and invest in them for his glory. But I still struggle. Why? Because of these old scripts. Because of the old narrative that was ingrained in me so harshly for so many years. Its not easy just shedding those old narratives and scripts off. So often I think to myself, “Who would want to read what I have to say? Its not like anyone cares. My words don’t really matter. I’ll just bury them and pursue something else. I’ll just focus on caring for my daughter and being a better spouse and cleaning house, I don’t have time to write. Its not like anyone cares anyways.” That perspective, I have learned, is extremely damaging, and restricts God from carrying out the amazing work He wants to do in my life, and others.

In my last blog, I believe it was, I shared with ya’ll the time when I brought one of my friends and her husband to Jesus. How did that start? She read my blog. During that time, my blog was just something I did to try and exercise my writing muscles. Even though these muscles were weak and poisoned by low self-esteem, I decided to push through it and share my thoughts into, what I really thought was, the empty void. But someone noticed me. They noticed my devotion to my faith, my resilience, my tenacity to keep chugging along even when things sucked. They noticed, and they asked me about it! And that led to Nick and I sharing Jesus with her, and her sharing Jesus with her husband. They saved their marriage that was on the brink of failure, and now they are born again Christians!

Now, I do not take ownership for this. It was ALL God. BUT, He used me and, what I thought were words that no one was reading, to captivate her. I didn’t do it, but at the same time I did. I did because I put my faith in God, and decided to write anyways despite my insecurities. And as a result, He BLESSED me with a new friend, and saved her!

That is what I will leave behind, my words. That will be my legacy. It may take even more pain and struggling to fully come to terms with my talent, and how I need to invest in it, but just like God blessed me then, He can and will do it again if I put my faith and trust in Him. And if you are in a similar boat, and God is trying to teach you how to invest in and take on your talents, He can do the exact same thing for you!

Autumn has woken up, haha, but I hope to come back here very soon. I am so blessed to have the audience I have in each of you, and if you have made it to the end, thank you so much. I didn’t get to cover everything I wanted to cover, but maybe this is where I should end it for now so God can put more on my heart for next time. I love you all, and look forward to sharing more soon. 🙂

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

Jeremiah 29:11