New resolution...

to see the beauty in everything. I want to be the kind of person that sees beauty in brokenness, joy where there is pain, and hope where there is loss. I am surrounded by unbelievable beauty, and I want to train myself to notice it and to delight in it. I never want to lose the wonder that was so tangible as a child, that intense sense of mystery and newness that every child seems to have hard-wired into his DNA. I’ve been thinking about this a good bit lately, and I’m working on a running list of things that I love, things that evoke that sense of wonder at the beauty that is in every corner of the world.

I love fireflies. I love it when there are so many of them that it looks like the night is strung with a thousand strands of twinkle lights. I love being barefoot on the beach at night and sand crab hunting with flashlights. I love looking at the sky through tree branches that make delicate, intricate designs so that the sky looks like lace. I love hearing people’s stories, and I think it’s so beautiful how there are a billion little pieces that fit together so perfectly to make a unique story that no one else has. I love watching people hold hands and thinking about how beautiful it is when people love each other. I love it when the sky changes colors, when one color melts into another. I think that weather is beautiful. I am fascinated by how there can be one day that is so beautiful and so clear that the sun warms everything to its very core, and there can be another day in St. Petersburg that is so bitter cold that people forget that warmth even exists. And other days the weather is so vicious that it seems like the sky is going to collapse. Mountains are beautiful- so raw and so wild. Words are beautiful. I love to read things that are written by people that know how to string words together in a way that it is beautiful. I wish I were better at it. I love beautiful smells, like a mound of clean, warm laundry, or the grove in the springtime, or honeysuckle. Grace is beautiful. It is so beautiful and so overwhelming that the God of the universe has chosen to wrap His arms around me and to take my life and turn it into something beautiful.

#1 Starting a Blog

I make lots of resolutions. Some of them I keep, some of them I break, some of them I forget that I ever made in the first place. I love making lists too. Grocery lists, to-do lists, bucket lists, lists of resolutions especially… I make lots of those. Anyway, somewhere in the middle of one of my lists of resolutions is the resolution to start a blog. Maybe this is due to my fear or forgetting my life after it happens, and maybe it’s just me jumping on the blogging bandwagon. Either way, I do think it’s such a shame to have so many experiences and learn so many things then forget that they ever happened. It’s almost the same thing as them never having happened in the first place. Not quite…but almost. All that to say, I’m starting a blog in an attempt to document the remainder of my college experience. Things I do, people I meet, places I go, things I learn. These first two years had more substance to them than I could even begin to relate. So much growth, mercy, brokenness, community, and hope packed into the space of two years. And from the very beginning of freshman year to the end of sophomore year, there has been an overarching, unending theme of grace that ties everything together and will continue to tie everything together until my story is finished, perfectly woven into the story of redemption.