Glory in my Valley

Lord, high and holy, meek and lowly,
You have brought me to the valley of vision, where I live in the depths but see
You in the heights; hemmed in by mountains of sin I behold Your glory.
Let me learn by paradox
That the way down is the way up,
That to be low is to be high,
That the broken heart is the healed heart,
That the contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit,
That the repenting soul is the victorious soul,
That to have nothing is to possess all,
That to bear the cross is to wear the crown,
That to give is to receive,
That the valley is the place of vision.
Lord, in the daytime stars can be seen from deepest wells,
And the deeper the wells, the brighter Your stars shine;
Let me find Your light in my darkness,
Your life in my death,
Your joy in my sorrow,
Your grace in my sin,
Your riches in my poverty,
Your glory in my valley.

-This was in the "Worship Meditation" section of our bulletins at church today at Redeemer Presbyterian. I changed all the "Thy"s to "You"s to make it a little more personal to me. And it pretty much sums up my most honest prayers about my own life these days.

Heather's survey

Heather posted this on her blog and challenge me to do it too, so here goes:

What was I doing 10 years ago?
Getting ready to graduate from high school and participating in all of the Senior Year activities, that go along with that (mostly being obnoxious with Sharon, my BFF)

5 Things on my To Do List:
-make dinner
-finish my DTD extension for my Humanities Computing project
-decide where to live for the next 2 months
-vacuum out my car
-register for summer and fall classes

5 Snacks I enjoy:
strawberries
cheese and crackers
yogurt
ice cream (is that a real snack?)
grapes

5 Things I would do if I were a Billionaire:
-give lots to all my friends in ministry who raise support
-pay off all my debt
-take a trip around the world
-hire a maid
-eat fancy dinners

5 Bad Habits:
-biting my lip
-eating too much sugar
-not answering my phone
-leaving dishes in the sink
-falling asleep with the TV on
(those are just the ones I'll actually admit to...)

5 Places I've Lived:
-Marietta, GA
-Powder Springs, GA
-Athens, GA
-Paris, France
-Pisa, Italy

5 Jobs I've Had:
-retail at clothing and gift stores.
-waitress at Taco Mac
-After-school program at various elementary schools
-intern with Campus Crusade for Christ
-high school French teacher

Now all my friends who have blogs have to do it too!

Fun-filled Day

I'm staying with Michelle and Dan's kids this weekend while they are out of town. They left this early this morning and although I am a little tired, I'm having lots of fun being "Aunt" Becca. This morning we had milk and cereal for breakfast while they all sang the song they know about this topic by G. Love and Special Sauce. Then we did home-schooling work. After that I took the two youngest kids to a friend's house so they could go with them to pick strawberries at Washington Farms. While they were gone, another child went to stay at a friend's house and I was left with the two oldest at lunchtime. We needed to go pick up a birthday gift for a party tomorrow and we decided to have lunch at Chik-fil-A since we were going to be right there! I think this was a real treat for these two older kids. AND they were passing out samples of their new flavor of milkshake, so we each had a taste of Coffee Caramel Milkshake for dessert!

When we got back to the house, the two youngest kids came back with their fresh strawberries and we all put on our swimsuits and rushed over to the pool at my apartment complex. We had the pool all to ourselves this afternoon so that was nice, but the water was so cold! Little Hope's lips were quivering but she still wanted to swim. After we got all tired out from that, we drove back to the house and decided that the perfect snack after swimming would be a Scooby-Doo cheese and a peppermint brownie cookie with milk. It really hit the spot!

Two more kids have gone now to spend the night with friends and I just have the two youngest kids here at the house. They are watching The Little Mermaid which I'm pretty sure they had never seen before I brought it over earlier this week. I don't mind watching it because it has always been one of my favorite movies....well, since 1989 or so when it first came out....and I know all the songs by heart!

I'll probably go to bed at 8pm when the kids do because I'm not used to all this running around and having fun. But it has been a blast!

Fighting for Joy

I'm reading a book by John Piper called When You Don't Desire God

Here is something he has to say:
"The fight for joy is the struggle to trust God with the burdens of life. It’s a fight for freedom from worry. It’s a fight for hope and peace and joy, which are all threatened by unbelief and doubt about God’s promises...It’s a way of saying that
we are weak and desperately need the mercy of God."

I have to think about this a little more.

Insomnia and Bizarre Dreams

First, let me say that I'm really surprised people are actually reading this blog! Maybe I'm more interesting that I thought.

But right now I can't sleep. I've been trying to go back to sleep for about an hour, and that gets really boring and frustrating. Then I got hungry.... So what does one do at 4am when one cannot sleep? I'm eating yogurt, watching the news (who knew the news starts on CBS at 4am?), and catching up on anything I might have missed on Facebook. It's too late for me to take something to help me go back to sleep, so I just have to find something to do. Yesterday I woke up really early and started reading one of my library books for my thesis research. It was actually very entertaining and interesting to me and I thought 'I should do this more often when I can't sleep.'

I don't know why I can't sleep. Most of the time it's hard for me to fall asleep because my mind is just racing thinking about things and I can't get it to stop. It's not that I'm really worried about anything, I just have a head full of thoughts. But right now, I'm not really thinking about anything at all.

A few nights ago, I had a dream about my mom's puppies. She breeds Cocker Spaniels and English Toy Spaniels. She actually has a website called Dawgpatch with lots of cute pictures and information about puppies. My dad calls the English Toys "monkey-faced rat dogs" because they have sunken in noses and beady eyes. The puppies are actually really cute and sweet, but it's still funny that he calls them this.


So in my dream, someone was getting a puppy from my mom, but the puppy was acting really wierd and pooping all over the place and getting into everything, being really bad and not acting much like a sweet little lap-dog puppy. So she took the puppy to the vet and had all kinds of tests run on it, only to discover that the puppy was actually half monkey! The vet said (remember this is a dream) that a monkey must have wandered into my parents yard and bred with the mother of these puppies and produced monkey puppies! So mom had to call all of the other new owners and tell them they had monkeys and not pure-breed English Toys.

My dream was so vivid that when I woke up, I actually thought this had happened until I was alert enough to realize that this is ridiculous! I immediately called my mom to tell her about my hilarious dream. I don't think she enjoyed it quite as much as I did, but my dad sure did laugh when I told him that I dreamed that the "monkey-faced rat dogs" really were monkeys.

So which is better, insomnia or crazy dreams? At least I am entertained by my dreams....

Fun with Templates and Themes

If you haven't found this out about me yet, I'm definitely the kind of person who wants to know how everything works. It's usually not enough for people to give me facts. I always want to know why or get some kind of background information. I take things apart just to see how they're made and then see if I can put them back together. I do this with abstract concepts too, like languages with their syntax and grammar as well as theological arguments. It can be a blessing and a curse all at the same time. On one hand, I'm hardly ever bored--but on the other hand, I have trouble sleeping at night because I never stop thinking about things.

That is essentially what is so fascinating to me about computer programming and especially web sites. Today I spent more time than I should have fiddling with CSS codes to try and create this really cool layout I have here on my blog now. I actually went to the CSS Zen Garden website for inspiration and ideas. I found one of the designs that didn't quite make the cut and used a lot of codes from that design. I used Photoshop to create the background where it looks like handwritten notes about this blog. I guess what is really important is that I had fun doing it. And now I am really proud of the way my blog looks. I think it also reflects more of my personality than the original classic template I had. I'm sure I will decide to change it in the next few months and find a new challenge in CSS. That's what happened with my MySpace profile--as soon as I finally had my profile coded the way I wanted it, I was ready to change it already!

I also added one of my favorite songs by Patty Griffin to the page. Please feel free to silence that if it annoys you. I realize that people often prefer silence during their web browsing, so there is the option of the pause button. Thanks for checking out my new design!

So many websites....

I just updated my Facebook profile to add the URL to this site. Then I started to wonder why I feel like I have to be all over the internet. It would probably be easier to just have one site with different pages for different things (blog, professional stuff, etc). But for some reason, I have 4 different pages. However, two of those pages are part of "social networking" sites so I really don't have the option of moving that information. It just kind of baffling to me how everyone is on the internet now, not just using the internet, but also featured in various websites.

I think I like having all of these different pages because I'm curious about how they work. It's really fun for me to try to create my own layouts and widgets and take them apart to look at the code and all the pieces. So there's my justification for have 4 websites....none of them being particularly interesting.

Writing a Blog

I heard somewhere that the average reader per blog is 1. Only one reader per blog. I don't know if that is including the author of the blog, but I thought it was pretty sad. So I have this blog that I was not planning on doing anything with. But I'm just curious to see if anyone will read it. We'll see. I wasn't going to blog about anything because I don't think my life is all that interesting to people who don't know me well. And for those who do know me well, I just tell them what's going on instead of writing it in a blog. So I don't know what I will post here, but I'm sure I'll think of something.