Dust

It's amazing what we set aside to collect dust. Beautiful things, like vases from people who've given flowers, spare change, picture frames with photos you no longer have to look at because you've looked at them 1,000 times before, and jewelery that you'll never wear again. I found my collection of pennies tonight. It's a pitiful collection if you knew how long I've been collecting. Mainly because I forget that I'm collecting them or I use my debit card instead of cash. So tonight, in honor of finding my collection, I went on a hunt for all the pennies around the house and in my car to add to my collection. I think I doubled my collection just from the pennies I found on my mom's dresser.

It was on her dresser that I also found small pieces of jewelery my sisters and I had bought for her in Mother's Days past that said things like "Best Mom" and "I <3 you Mom." My personal favorites are the butterfly pins she's collected over the years. She loves butterflies because they are to her a symbol of new life. Which, if you knew my mother the way I do, is a tear-jerking statement to hear her say and is, to me, a glimpse of God's amazing love for us. I doubt she knows just how much she has influenced my view of grace, in a good way of course.

I'll be the first to admit that my mom and I don't always see eye to eye and sometimes I wonder how on earth we could be related. I don't think that we look alike by any means and our personalities are almost complete opposites. But, putting all those things aside she is my mother. She's the one who showed me how to love God and love people, she was the one that put up with me crawling into bed with her when there was a thunderstorm, she was the one who drove me to all my sporting events and was my sideline cheerleader, she's been the one to encourage me and to give me an honest opinion, and she's bent over backwards to make sure my sisters and I were taken care of.

I love my mother and I know that I don't tell her that enough. I'm thankful for all that she has verbally told me and what she's silently taught me by the way she lives her life. I'm getting to the age where her monarchy over my life is over and I get to make the mistakes for myself, but I have yet to out grow her. She is no longer the disciplinarian, but my friend and I never thought that I would live to hear myself say that. She has weathered the storms of my trouble-making childhood, my moody preteen years, and my angst ridden teenage existence and I hope now to show her my gratitude by living out the one goal she has set for me: to love the Lord my God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength. Thank you for loving me when I didn't deserve it. I wouldn't be where I am without you.

Happy Mother's Day, Momma :)

Keep your coins. I want change.

Well sports fans it's then end of another era. I graduate from SLCC this Saturday ending my three year stay in the great city of St. Louis, Missouri. Most of my friends are graduating with the Bachelors degree and I (although I have second semester, Jr. level credits) am graduating with my Associates. In a way I feel like I wimped out. I was so close to a bachelors and I just threw in the towel. The fact of the matter is: I wasn't happy there. I had never been happy there. I settled on SLCC because I didn't think to plan for the future and I didn't want to do a lot of extra work. It was cheap, it was easy, it was safe, and it made my mother happy. I don't regret any of the time that I spent there. I love the people I've met and built strong relationships with, I love the professors who have taught me, I love the knowledge that I've learned, I love that my time there has brought me closer to God, and I love the life I got to live. I am blessed because of my time there. What I do regret is not seeing that my heart was not in line with what God wanted for me. I wanted easy and God wanted more than what was convenient.

I don't think He wanted me to settle for a life of being married before the age of 22. I don't think He wanted me to settle for the path that had already been tread by my sisters. I don't think He wanted me to settle for the safety of my five year plan of school, marriage, kids, and Africa. It's funny to think of the 18 year-old-girl that first set foot on that campus and how she is almost nothing like the 21 year-old me now. Different dreams, different focus, different plans, different person.

Last Saturday (May 1) Mandy and Kayla and I took a day trip up to Chicago to hang out and we were supposed to take Mandy to check out SAIC, but it never happened. Somewhere between eating lunch at Gino's East and making faces in "The Bean" in Millennium Park it hit me that this was going to become my new city. That at the end of the month I was headed into a spiral of new, well, everything and I wasn't doing much to prepare for it. Everything started to get real, these plans I made many, many months ago were starting to breath and exist in more places than just my mind. I'm going to be moving to a new city, with new people, knowing very few people, and embarking on a whole new life direction. This should scare anyone, but (although I am a little nervous) I'm more excited than anything.

I'm interested to see how different the me now will be from the me after Summit's over.

That's all for now, I'm sleepy, but I promise to try to do a better job of updating this thing from now on.