rebelling against low expectations
Write your plans in pencil; prepare for God to edit them. If I could even begin to tell you the number of plans I’ve stenciled over the past five years, you would start to feel very overwhelmed. I’m not much of a planner when it comes to daily schedules or, say, writing a novel, but I like to have a rather tidy control over the grand scheme of my existence. Unfortunately, that hasn’t played out...
Teenagers. We’re a bunch of kid-adults who often have no idea who we are or who we ought to be. We grasp at all kinds of things to find identity, things like beauty, sports, and intelligence. And for so long, I’ve prided myself in being above those things. Maybe all the rest of the world cares about beauty and sports and intelligence, but in the words of the Little Red Hen’s friends when she...
I can not people today. Pushing past twenty-three faces in the hallway of the B building, staring out the window in English class, retreating in the corners of the garden under a cloud of misty rain… There are some days I just want to hide from the world, forget about humanity. Peopling is hard. It’s hard to put yourself out there, to be vulnerable, to invest in a friendship with another human...
If I had to use one word to describe this semester, it would not be the word “fun.” As if a full load of college classes wasn’t enough, high school algebra and chemistry are killing my GPA. I don’t know anyone taking the same classes as me, classes I didn’t want to take in the first place. And no one wants to get me started about the complete lack of decent places to sit and study...
In the book of Deuteronomy, God commands his people to remember. In fact, he commands this thirteen times. Remember who God is. Remember what he did for you. Remember his promise. The Israelites weren’t particularly good at remembering. Hiking through the desert, they were more focused on the present concerns of hunger, thirst, and exhaustion than the heritage of their people. If anything, they...
Three weeks ago, my family switched churches. Again. Going from a five hundred people church back down to a fifty people church is…different.It’s taken me three years to start unearthing the secrets of acceptance at my last church. Now, even though I’m still going to youth group on Wednesdays, all that hard work is starting to seem pointless. It’s as if another inch of sand washes out from under...
How are you? I’m not asking how you want to be, how you think you should be, or how others assume you are.In the depth of your heart, are you really okay? Underneath the formalities and the small talk, are you really fine?What would you say if words were more than a formality–if you were to honestly answer the question?I think a lot of us, the majority of us, are not okay, not fine, and not...
Excuse the generalization, but homeschooled kids like myself can have have really strong imaginations about the scary world of “school.”As we watch the Christian movies and hear the warnings of our Sunday school teachers, our minds get stuffed with ideas of all the persecution we could face.Well, after just three weeks as a dual-enrollment student at my local community college, I can tell you...
It was the last day of my high school biology class: Presentation day.For two hours straight, my classmates told me how the soaps I’m washing my hands with are exposing our bodies to antibiotics, allowing bacteria to become immune to the them so that when someone truly needs an antibiotic to fight an infection, the antibiotic will be useless. They warned me the food I’m eating is genetically...
I felt so small. Sitting in the Starbucks at a hospital, I watched white-coated doctors, blue-scrubbed nurses and busy-looking people come and go. So many people flooding so small a section of the massive building. Each one so confident, knowing what to do and where to go. And me? I just sat there feeling the inadequacy of my 5’0” self. Drowning in a sea of people, in a world too big for me...
rebelling against low expectations
