God is an Onion.

Every night I read a chapter in my bible and try to learn from it as much as possible. Tonight, in one of the most short and unlikely of passages, God taught me an important lesson that I think we as Christians kind of adopted without necessarily backing it up with scripture. Tucked away in a segment of Mark 8 God taught me that he's actually an onion. 

I know what you're thinking: what lesson have we as Christians adopted that teaches us God is an onion? Well I'll obviously explain, but first thumb through your bible to Mark 8:22 and read to verse 26 (You all can do this, it's 5 verses). Basically Jesus spits in a blind dude's eyeballs (ew, Jesus) and asks him to describe what he sees. The blind man tells Jesus that he thinks he sees people, except they kinda look like giant trees to him. Now obviously the goal of Jesus' whole little miracle he's working on here is to get the blind man to not be blind. So Jesus rubs his hands around on this guy's eyes some more and all of the sudden the man can see "distinctly", as my bible reads. 

The first thing that came to my mind when I got through this section was times of season. In my own life this looks like my first semester of college last year. In others lives this could look like a loss of a job or financial trouble or any of the other thousands of seasons we can walk through in this life. God starts us on a journey and we get to a point where we think He should be done working his magic in our lives so we open up our eyes to look around and everything around us is all wrong.  How many people have given up on faith and God all together because of this premature peek at life and a hurried evaluation of God himself. We need only to have the faith of the blind man. To close our eyes yet again and allow the hand of God to touch us in our most vulnerable of places so that when God is ready for us to open our eyes we can see distinctly. 

So God is an onion. He's a process. There is no one-step acne treatment in God's eyes. You start at "Go" and you peel back layer after layer until God is done with his handiwork, not when we decide that we're done. Let's pray for the strength to be vulnerable to God and the faith to keep closing our eyes. 

Aint it Fun Livin' in the Real World?

Well here I am, sitting in my itty bitty dorm room, writing a blog post. The last 2 days have been filled with such mixed emotions from every end of the spectrum but I think the one word that just ties it all together perfectly is "overwhelming".  Absolutely nothing I have had planned in my head for many many months now has actually happened as I had planned it. From the bed loft I thought I would buy not fitting my bed to my dorm being too small to actually fit the bed loft I did end up buying in the way I thought it would be. Adjusting to living in a room a little bit bigger than my bathroom meant for 2 people and sharing a bathroom with 20 other girls has been different. but it has definitely been a good different.

God has definitely been trying to teach me before classes even begin. I have learned that you have GOT to roll with the punches or you will sink. When you graduate high school, the crap that life throws at you gradually becomes more and more uncomfortable. I am super surprised that right off the bat things became more difficult. You have to adjust. I really do enjoy dorm life but it definitely isn't the comfortable life that most high school seniors have in their heads. Things have changed so much in the short time that I have been here and it would really have been easy if I just had given up and decided that I hated college that first day. But I didn't. I sat back and wondered why God would give me this cup. He did it in the name of teaching 

From this point on, I will always look for solutions to problems in a more realistic way than ever before. These are real life problems that I am encountering, things that I have to fix on my own. I am so glad that I was introduced to this right off the bat. It seems like such a simple thing that most people think is common sense, but it's not. You have to be on your own, figuring out your own problems for it to really connect. 

For the rest of our lives, problems will arise. Set backs will come. Everything we have had planned in our heads for years will not go as planned. And that's okay. Our God is with us and he has a plan. And things always go according to his plans. That is enough comfort for the next 4 years of college and a year getting my masters and a career and a husband and some kids. Or you know, whatever God has planned for me. 

Have fun out there fellow college students! The fun has just begun. And adults out there, remember this lesson too. God bless!