What am I Most Thankful For?

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays for many reasons but mainly because there are so many things that I am blessed with and have to be thankful for.  The thing I am most thankful for is having such wonderful relationships with my family and friends.  God has blessed me with an amazing Christian family and so many uplifting Christ-like friends.  My best friends in particular are such a blessing to my life and I honestly do not know what I would do and how I would live without them.  Each one of them is a gift from God to me, as well as my wonderful parents and brothers. I often take for granted these people that are huge parts of my life, but thanksgiving is a reminder to me that not everyone is blessed with encouraging friends and a great Christian home/environment that I live in every single day.

Career Day Experience

Career day today was a very interesting learning experience for me and many others.  The 4 careers I sat in on were Music, Special Education, Ministry, and Nursing.  From these sessions, I learned many things.  For example, I decided that I never want to go into the music business because there are too many downsides and risks on that occupational path.  On the other hand, I realized that nursing is something I think would be fun and could be passionate about if I choose to take that  path in the future.  Therefore, my favorite session of the day was the nursing session.  I enjoyed it a lot because our speaker gave us lots of beneficial information not only about nursing itself, but she also talked about steps we should take now in high-school  to prepare us for the nursing career path we might decide  to take in college.  She was also very honest about the nature of the work and what a normal day in the life of a nurse is like.  She also discussed many different paths within the medical field, which gave me a nice perspective on the many options I would have if I chose to go  to nursing school.  I'm very glad I chose the nursing session and there are lots of beneficial  things that I learned from  it.

My Julius Caesar English Tri-fold Project

In my Honors English class, we each had to do a project based on the play Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare.  The project I chose to do was a tri-fold poster over the various settings of the play  and visuals to  depict them.  I chose this project because I am a poster project type of person and it was something I would enjoy doing.  The 5 different settings I chose to depict with visuals from the play were the streets of Rome, Brutus' orchard, the Roman forum, the senate house, and the battlefields at Philippi.  From this project, I learned that Shakespeare put lots of thought into the different settings of the play.  For example, Brutus' orchard/garden is the setting where Brutus chooses to betray Caesar.  This ties symbolically to the story in the bible of Judas' betrayal of  Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.  I also learned a little about the Roman culture and the city of Rome itself by studying the Roman forum and the Senate House.  The picture included is a picture of my tri-fold project.  

My Reflections on Spiritual Emphasis Week: Chocolate Morsels and the Living Vine

This week during spiritual emphasis week, there were many things that Brent preached that really jumped out at me and helped me to think about common spiritual concepts  in a new way.  This whole week I have felt God speaking to me through so many points made in the sermons.  Today especially, the sermon was very powerful to me. Today Brent preached on John 5:1-9.  Relating to these verses, Brent gave us a great analogy about what it really means to live in Christ.  When every human being is born, he is like a "branch in a vase" that is dead and has no life.  But when we become Christians, we as dead branches become attatched to a vine (God) that gives us life.  When we become attatched to this vine, the life in the vine becomes the life in us, and "what is true for the vine is true for us."  This is a common analogy that I have heard a few times before, but Brent told it in a way that made me think about my life differently.  As Christians, we should not be of ourselves, the world, or anything else other than God; Therefore the life in us should be God living through us, and we should be trying our hardest to live in a way that Christ wants us to live.
Another analogy that Brent gave during chapel today was the "chocolate morsel" analogy.  The way many people snack and pick up bits and pieces of whatever they can find is how many people live: they take and consume bits and pieces of the world.  However, the world (or these snacks) will never satisfy us, and we will always remain hungry after this.  But once we "take a bite of"  Christ, or the semi-sweet chocolate morsels, our hunger will be satisfied.  Therefore, "we shouldn't be bloated by the world", but filled with Christ.  This also really spoke to me because it gave me an easy way to remember not to conform to what the world is doing, but to seek and abide in Christ in everything that I do.
My goal and  prayer after this week is not only that I will no longer conform to the world and act in a way that is no different from those who are not christians, but I also desire to let the Holy Spirit living in me reflect in everything that I do. I want it to be evident in my life that I am a part of the living vine, and my hunger is not for the world, or temporary snacks that won't completely satisfy me, but for God, the chocolate morsels.