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A Joyful Return

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  I started this blog when I was 19 years old, nearly five years ago as an outlet after walking through many emotional and challenging life circumstances. I had just finished my first year of college and gotten out of an unhealthy relationship, both bringing a slew of other difficulties along with them. On top of it all the world was in a state of medical and political panic as the global pandemic was at its height. I remember sitting on the back porch of my parent's house during quarantine with my beloved dog Annie, who has since passed, grappling with all the unprocessed things in my mind. I found myself opening my computer, shockingly for something other than online school, and I began writing about my life. Many of those stories, ideas, and ramblings never made it onto this blog. At the time I did not know I was writing a blog, I was just writing my stories in a digital form as a way for my mind to process the world around me. After writing about my Night to Shine experience, w...
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Advocate Adjust Accommodate

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Hello and Welcome to Joyfully Walking by Faith.  Have you ever felt like there was something about you that wasn't the same as everyone else? Maybe you are like me and you feel like your brain works differently than most people's brains do.  My whole academic life I have quietly struggled. I struggled to learn how to read. I struggle with reading comprehension. I struggle to spell words correctly. I struggle with math. I struggled to learn how to tell time on an analog clock. I struggle to retain information unless it is presented verbally, visually, and physically. Essentially I have an undiagnosed learning disability.  I'll start from the beginning. My mom is not only a teacher but one who has spent a large portion of her career focused on specifically teaching children how to read. I also had an incredible Kindergarten teacher when I was in the public school system.  When I was in this teacher's class she noticed that I was consistently mixing up letters like "b...
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I Don't Get It

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  Jesus replied, "You do not realize now what I am doing but later you  will understand."  - John 13:7       When I was in high school I had this verse on the back of my phone case. I carried it everywhere with me and read it routinely. I used it for encouragement during the time of my life where I was trying to figure out how to become the person that God has called me to be.  I am not going to sit here and tell you that life always makes sense because we are all well aware that is far from the truth. Over the past year, our world has experienced a long period of time where very little of our lives have made much sense. Our lives have been halted and our expectations have been bulldozed. We have had to learn what to do when our plans are no longer possible and when we don't know what our future will look like. We have had to learn, now more than ever, how to live in the moment. Which if I am honest I don't think I have really learned yet, and I a...
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Moving During a Pandemic

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Hello! Welcome back to Joyfully Walking by Faith!  As I prepared to start a new semester and move back out of my family's home and into my new living situation I wanted to take some time to share what it was like to move out of my previous situation a few months ago and compare it to what it was like to move into my apartment. I felt like now would be an appropriate time to share this crazy story with you all.  As I mentioned in my last post my college extended our spring break an extra week as a result of the rapidly rising amount in Covid-19 cases back in March. I also mentioned that my teachers had been transparent of their assumption that we would not return to traditional education. What I did not know is that I would not be permitted to return to my dorm if I left for the spring break. We were told that if we left we would be allowed to return. That was not the case as one week after I left I received an email that informed us that if we had left for the break we were no...
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Planted with Purpose

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In times like these, it is incredibly difficult to find contentment. When plans change and things are suddenly very different then we expected them to be, we struggle to accept how things are. I have experienced a string of changes in my life in the past six months. Through these changes, I have strived to ask God to show me "why am I planted here at this time rather than where I was expecting to be?".    One of the greatest changes that I have experienced was moving back home amide the rise of the Covid-19 pandemic. In early March I returned home to attend a Steven Curtis Chapman concert with my family for the weekend. At the time the virus was a concern but it was not yet a major issue. I was very vaguely aware of its presence but was not keeping enough of a tab on its growth to be aware of how it would affect me directly as I knew that could easily cause me to experience great anxiety. I returned to school expecting to make the trip back home two weeks later for spring bre...
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Night to Shine 2020

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Recently I have had time to finally sit down and write about my Night to shine experience. God was completely intertwined in the whole night and it was incredible. I found Tim Tebow and the Tim Tebow Foundation back in 2014 when he started putting on an event called "Night to Shine", a Prom for people with special needs. His ministry immediately spoke directly to my heart. I am not the kind of person who has a long "bucket list" of things that I want to do but since I was 14 years old my "bucket list" consisted of one single thing. Working with the Tim Tebow Foundation. That dream was achieved on February 7, 2020. I was meant to be there and I fought to be there. When I first moved to College I had a really difficult time settling in, especially finding a home church, something that as a Pastor's Kid I had never had to do before. I began attending my new home church out of convenience and the first week that I chose to stay at my church the pastor ...
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