Small Victory

I'm in the process of cleaning things up for my senior show, which opens in a week and a half! When I'm under deadline on one of my interior design projects, things tend to get done, but not always to the quality that I want them to be done to. I've had the opportunity to revise things so that they can go up in the gallery. One of them has been this perspective of a studio apartment:

If you hate it, sorry. It looks kind of circus-ey to me, but it's one of those things where you just spec paint colors and you choose walls arbitrarily and then you draw it out and you think...I wish I would have ordered more neutral paint samples. :) Anywho, I like to think it would look good in real life. I designed the bed/bedside tables myself.

This thing represents a small victory because this is the only perspective that I have not cried over! This is not the area of interior design that I excel in. My sophomore year, I had to be enrolled in what was effectively 25 hours of design courses (design courses meet for double the number of hours you register for). It was awful. I literally slept less than 5 hours a night for the entire semester and I would lay in bed and mentally draw a set of construction drawings in my head because I could not sleep. So one weekend, I was going into crunch time on a project. I still needed to draw and render (color with depth and shadow) a perspective. For the life of me I could not get it to look right. I figured out I was maybe drawing it too small, so, after 7 hours of struggling with it, I went to the library to blow up my plan so I could draw it bigger. While I was in the library, it hit me...this project was not going to get done. There was no way. So, I wept my eyes out, right there in public. The librarian came up to me and hugged me. I still cannot look at her. :) Needless to say, that project did get done and now, I'm maybe even a little sad that the projects are over. Sigh.

Dear to Me

I celebrated my birthday with four girls who I love very much tonight! They all out-did themselves in celebrating my birthday and it was fun to have everybody together and enjoy some sketchy (but delicious!) Mexican food together. I am thankful and will miss them when I leave South Carolina. Oh dear...the nostalgia begins. :)

He Met Me!

If I had to name two of my biggest pet peeves about Christians, I would say carrying your Bible to church in the box it came in and over-spiritualizing lame experiences. That said, I think I'm about to do the second. I am finding that God is just totally meeting me where I'm at...even when I'm in that whole wallowing spot that accomplishes just about nothing for Him and adds nothing to His glory.

Last night I was bummed. I had just torn a link off of my paper chain and counted how many I had left. 40 days. I wrote a post about that, so, if you read it, you can see that I was just feeling really discouraged. I opened my Bible afterwards to do my quiet time and God just absolutely met me. I began recalling all of the things in the Bible that took forty days: Jesus' temptation, Moses going up on the mountain to be in God's presence and get the 10 commandments, Noah's time in the ark... Then God brought one to mind that I hadn't thought of before...Jesus' time here after his resurrection. I started thinking about it. Jesus died, went to be with his Father in heaven for 3 days, then CAME BACK here and stayed for 40 days. Can you even imagine? I mean, I want to go home...and that is a place filled with sin, hopelessness, sinful people (me included!), and uncertainty. I love it, but it is all of those things. Jesus' home was perfect in every sense of the word but he CAME BACK for 40 days.

I have to confess: I'm a bit of cynic. (Knew that already?! Sorry, I don't do much to hide it!) I have heard people say that Jesus has had any experience that I have ever had and that he can relate to me in every sense of my life. But, honestly, I had not really, personally encountered this to be true until last night.

To use a junior high youth retreat term, God has been "rocking my face off" this semester by teaching me to trust him and drawing me into a deeper and deeper relationship with him. I am more aware of his intimacy now than any other point in my life as a believer. Weird thing is, ever since about 5 days ago, I've been feeling a rift. I was trying to think if there was some kind of sin pattern that was unconfessed or unresolved relationship stuff or what when my memory verse from last month hit me: "Let us go right into the presence of God, with hearts fully trusting him..." That's it! I had quit trusting him, quit believing him for what he said he would do. My heart was divided. How could I expect to be in his presence?!

Well, those are just a few reflections for tonight. Let's just say 39 days seems a whole lot more do-able now and (as usual!) my "problems" are becoming more and more microscopic as I consider this God who holds the span of all of creation between his thumb and forefinger! Praise Him, for He is bigger than us and He has overcome the world!

40 Days

I miss my friends.

40 days until I graduate. It's hard not to wish it away. I know I never get it back, but right now, I don't even want it! I just want to be back with my dear Rentel sisters and sit around and talk for hours, take forever to make a simple decision, shorten words unnecessarily, have sleep over after sleep over, eat dinner three hours later than anyone else and laugh endlessly. I'm so excited for the day that I don't have to say goodbye for a long time like this anymore.

Six Little Letters

Yesterday I passed my LEED exam. I'm a LEED AP!!! These six little letters represent more than 100 hours of studying, a goal accomplished, and the faithfullness of my God! He did this!

I've been studying for the exam since January, studying for a total of 2 months before taking the exam. Passing it means I'll be able to work on sustainable interior design projects to help achieve LEED certification. Every single day of studying has been a struggle--to be motivated to do it, to understand what I'm learning, and to remember it. I've been asking God almost every day to help me to be committed to this and to help improve my recall. Last weekend, I finished all of my studying and took a practice test. I got a 45%. I was so discouraged. I kept studying and I kept taking practice tests. I got a 46%, 51%, 90% (yay!), and then on the last night before my exam...a 39%. I was so discouraged. I knew that I couldn't pass this test. I prayed about it and it was like the Lord spoke directly to me telling me that (once again!) I needed to trust Him and that He would come through and that HE (not me!) would receive the glory for it. So, I trusted.

My test was at 2:30 yesterday in Greenville off of exit 48. I live at exit 27, so I left with an hour and 45 minutes to get there. That is more than enough time. As I was leaving, I was amazed that I didn't feel nervous at all, I felt an overwhelming peace. At exit 40, I hit stand still traffic and I sat at this exit for an hour and fifteen minutes. There had been a big accident and I didn't even get to start moving from this exit until 2:35. I made it to the test site at 3:00 and asked if they would please let me take the exam. The lady said I could, but I'd have to finish at the same time I was originally scheduled to, 4:30. That shaved an hour off of my allotted test time, and my practice tests told me I needed the full time. I took it anyway. When I finished the exam, I was amazed. I had passed. Glory be to God! I am experiencing what it means to trust Him in a whole new way. I am learning that he cares about these little things in my life!

Headed back to Colorado today for spring break! Please pray for this family.

God is using the paraphrase of 2 Cor 5: 14-21 in a powerful way right now! I think this is the verse he is showing me to memorize for the second half of this month. It is incredible, I am seeing that Christ is placing scripture in my life through music, chapel, church, and my quiet times. He is persistently placing the same scriptures before me, over, and over again. I have so much to learn. Here are the verses he's using now:

14-15Our firm decision is to work from this focused center: One man died for everyone. That puts everyone in the same boat. He included everyone in his death so that everyone could also be included in his life, a resurrection life, a far better life than people ever lived on their own.
16-20Because of this decision we don't evaluate people by what they have or how they look. We looked at the Messiah that way once and got it all wrong, as you know. We certainly don't look at him that way anymore. Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life burgeons! Look at it! All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins. God has given us the task of telling everyone what he is doing. We're Christ's representatives. God uses us to persuade men and women to drop their differences and enter into God's work of making things right between them. We're speaking for Christ himself now: Become friends with God; he's already a friend with you.
21How? you ask. In Christ. God put the wrong on him who never did anything wrong, so we could be put right with God. -2 Cor 5:14-21 The Message

Aren't We Resourceful?

Mary Chath had an interview this morning. She has a sweating problem and she was worried that her pit stains would show through her blazer by the time she arrived at her interview. Well...I decided to fix this problem by affixing a couple of trusty pantiliners to her top and to the arms of her blazer. Perfect. :)
Mary Chath thinks that I need to have a section of my blog called "I Lack Discretion" for times like this. Puh-lease. Blogs are about real life...and this is it.

And look, she's all ready to go...and no one will know about our secret little helper! :-)

Don't worry, the sporty little t-shirt watch she has on this picture was wrestled away from her before she made it out the door. ;-) Good luck, Mary Kathryn!