22 Things About Me

I really like Abraham Piper's blog 22 Words. I also like his wife Molly's blog entitled The Pipers. So in honor Molly's recent post and Abraham's blog, I give you...

22 Things About Me

1. I was delivered by forceps.
2. When I was two my uncle nicknamed me the 'Pink Tornado' because my mom always dressed me in pink and I tore around the house like a crazy tornado in my walker.
3. I failed 'Cutting With Scissors' in preschool.
4. I had a crush on a snotty-nosed (literally) boy named Shawn when I was in the third grade.
5. I was home-schooled from the middle of fourth grade until the end of eighth grade.
6. I got a D one semester in Freshmen English because I could not bring myself to read Great Expectations which is probably the most boring book ever written.
7. I was nicknamed 'Air Jessica' in high school because I was really good at driving to the hole in basketball.
8. I won MVP my senior year in Track & Field. My events were 4X100 Relay, Long Jump, 330 Hurdles, and Shotput.
9. I do not like peas. The texture really gets to me.
10. I was terminated from my position as a bank teller because my cash drawer was short. I was SO depressed, but then they hired me at Victory Supermarkets because the manager knew my brother.
11. I was a waitress at The Bull Run for a year. That was a good job and it really prepared for my job now... as a nurse. 'Is there anything else I can get for you?'
12. A nursing instructor told me I gave a bad image to nursing. I told her I didn't think that was true so she removed those comments from my evaluation.
13. I have had 6 cars... a 1982 Dodge Aires, 1988 Ford Tempo, 1987 Plymouth Sable, 1982 Dodge Daytona, 1992 Mercury Topaz, and finally a 2000 Nissan Altima.
14. I took African Jazz Dance in college to fulfill my physical education requirement.
15. In college I took my car (that I used to get to and from my clinical in Boston) in for it's yearly inspection. The mechanic told me the only reason he was letting me drive it home was because I lived less than a mile away. He said something about rotted tie rods or something...
16. I LOVE mint chocolate chip ice cream with peanut butter topping.
17. One of my pupils is bigger than the other. I was born that way. When I get stressed or tired you can really tell the difference.
18. I didn't travel by plane until I was 24.
19. I sing alto and sometimes tenor in the choir but never soprano (or bass).
20. I have never broken a bone.
21. I am deathly allergic to pine nuts and have eaten them four times--in my grandmother's stuffed chicken, in spaghetti sauce at camp (apparently they add them to increase the protein content), in a Smart Ones dinner entre, and in finger sandwiches at a baby shower.
22. I have left my lights on in broad daylight and have had to get jump-started more times than I can count. I haven't done it in a while but I could always relapse.

Hope

I found a wonderful article on singleness at Boundless by Elisabeth Adams entitled One Single Day. I really would like the topic of marriage and singless to NOT exist, but I find that it follows me everywhere. I can never get away from it in my heart. I want to be married, and yet, I am not. I want the desire and the glaring lack of it's fulfillment to just go away, but at the same time I don't because I really want to get married. Oh my. Thankfully, with God's help and with the *years* of experience I have at being single I'm able to manage my unmarriedness without routinely wanting to jump off a bridge because of it. Pretty much, I have no choice, I must resolve myself to being single, nearing 30, with no end in sight. Now that I'm done sharing my very sad and sorrowful life, I'll share with you a quote from the aforementioned article.

Hope is inconvenient. It is paradoxical. It can be painful. It can search my heart and motives to the very bottom. I don't ask for hope, and often I don't actually want it. What I really want is for the desire to go away, or be granted. But by His grace, I hang onto hope anyway.

I may not have the 58 years of companionship that my grandparents had. It's unlikely that I'll have the eight children my parents had, and I will never be the young mommy that I had. But as as time goes on, it grows more clear to me that while my waiting years are irreplaceable, they are not wasted. Ultimately, it's not because of some great adventures they are giving me, some great benefit to others, or some great work I am doing. It's simply by knowing His outrageous love that I'm able to take something that's happening to me against my will — and mark it "Freely given to Jesus."

When Mary anointed Jesus' feet with pure spikenard, she gave something costly, something precious to her, something irreplaceable. It was others who said "Why this waste?" To the one who gave and the One who received, it was pure joy.

He never wastes what is precious to us! Not one single day.

My 20-somethings are gone. I will never, ever be married or have kids in my 20's. It is something I would NEVER have chosen. It was my dream to be a young mother and wife. And that will never happen. That chance is gone.

And, I do not believe things always happen because God is doing what's best for me or because He is trying to refine me and make my desire more focused on Him. I won't deny that my extended singless hasn't been very refining or cause me to draw closer to God (because it has!) but sometimes I think God allows things to happen or not to happen simply because He is, and was, and will always be. Simply because He can. He owns the cattle on a thousand hills. He spoke the stars into existence and calms the seas with a word. "Our God is in the heavens; He does whatever He pleases" (Psalm 115:3). And THAT is an awesome God. That is the God we serve and we worship.

May I bring glory to the God who is 'in the heavens' and 'does whatever He pleases'. And may I also be 'able to take something that's happening to me against my will — and mark it "Freely given to Jesus."'

Israel 2009

I took some random clips on my digital camera while in Israel. Here they are edited and put to music! Hope you enjoy! (I wish I had known that I could make a movie out of my clips because I would taken more and better shots.)

If you would like to see a large, full screen version of this try clicking here. A condensed 10 minute version is available to watch, full screen on YouTube here.

I also made a Shutterfly Website where you can view some pictures and take a peak at the photo book I made.