Going into the school year, I optimistically decided to write a letter every day except Wednesday and Sunday.
I didn’t do that last week, but I still want to try. I’m hoping to stick to my schedule this week, the one I drafted on graph paper at Starbucks in early August.
Also, look at me posting so much. Are you proud of me? The summer slump is over!
xoxo
Joy
I’m incredibly freaked out. For history, we have to write an eight page paper about a historical mystery, and our professor gave us a list of different ideas.
I spent yesterday Wikipedia searching all of them (there were about 75), and now I’m on edge. There were so many about creepy disappearances or axe murders or serial killers.
I feal squeamish just thinking about it.
Today, most of my family went to a professional soccer game, so my sister and I were left to walk home from church. I just realized now, about two hours after we got home, that I hadn’t closed the garage door after us.
Now I’m half convinced that there’s an axe murderer down there waiting to pounce.
It freaked me out to go and close the garage door.
I mean, we live in a crazy safe neighborhood.
Even just now I felt like someone was walking up the stairs.
It gives me the shivers. Those Saturday night mysteries that my dad sometimes watches don’t help. There was one with this guy that got killed in his own house. Bleh.
I keep hearing sounds. I just want my mamma to get home. 🙂
WARNING: This video is graphic. YouTube recommends you be 18 or older (although I was 16 when I watched).
I’m posting because this is the struggle Syrian Christians and Christians around the world face. It is real.
I feel very passionately about the need for Christians everywhere to pray passionately for our brothers and sisters who are being tortured and killed for Christ. There is power in prayer.
Christians are being killed for spreading the gospel of peace and reconciliation. Those who preach love are being murdered.
Pray for the persecuted church.
WARNING: graphic
I don’t follow the news. But I look through Instagrams, Ann Voskamp’s today, and see news which I was aware of at the time, but didn’t really know beyond the headlines.
And there, three days before Lent, before Ash Wednesday, 21 Egyptian Christians dead. How do I not pay attention to these things? They are so incredibly important.
I have this deep conviction that prayer is powerful. And yet I never pray. I never look out to see how I can pray for the persecuted church.
I leave them on their own, the persecuted. Just leave them.
Pray. Pray. Prayer. Why don’t I pray?
Oh, LORD God, I berate myself for this. Why do I not continually hold these brothers and sisters up in prayer?
Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God. This burdens my heart.
Lord Jesus, send a revival of prayer for the persecuted church into my own heart and into the hearts of all the other stuck up American teenagers who don’t pray. Send us into a frantic flurry of prayer.
Oh God, the persecuted are so brave. In my head I say I would die for you, but would I sit there, would I kneel, as the knife blade came toward my head?
I can’t fathom the dedication ISIS has toward killing. I will die for you God, I will give my life for you, but I do this because I am certain you will never ask me to murder anyone. You love your children. You love even the ISIS murderers. You love.
I’ve been in a bad mood all day. Fridays do that to me.
I need some good friends. My best friend from school went to college this year, and I’m feeling lonely.
I have other friends, but they’re not terribly similar to me. Also, one kid has a crush on me and it’s painfully obvious but I absolutely don’t like him.
So that makes going to school awkward. I don’t look forward to it at all right now. Bleh.
I need to cheer up. Go outside or something. Get off this darn computer. I spent the last hour and a half reading a new blog I found.
Now I need some down time. Maybe some more Bible reading time. Maybe some sit-outside-and-close-my-eyes time.
xoxo
Joy
If we’re honest, there’s not a ton of diversity in Colorado. Our current urban location has more diversity than in the rural-ish area we used to live, but compared to California or something, our diversity is negligible.
Nevertheless, today in McDonalds, there was a Muslim lady with her head covering, me with my Bible, and two Mormon missionaries in their white shirts and ties.
And I’m going nowhere with this post. I just thought it was an interesting picture, the three of our religions all together at McDonalds.
Yay American freedom I guess…?
My mamma is incredibly sweet. She gardens. She homeschools us. She’s a teaching leader at Bible Study Fellowship.
She was injured a terrorist bombing attack in Saudi Arabia.
My mamma was deployed to Saudi Arabia in 1996 with her Air Force squadron. This was two years before I was born. She lived on an Air Force Base in the Khobar Towers.
She and her friends were hanging out in her living room, near a set of huge glass doors.
A terrorist drove a truck loaded with explosives to the rear wall of the complex and detonated them remotely.
19 Air Force members died. 372 people were wounded.
I don’t know for certain if my mom was on that list. She suffered a deep cut in her neck from the exploding glass French doors.
This was my third grade essay: “My Mom is Brave”. Because of this: after she had that huge slash in her neck, she volunteered in the hospital helping all the other wounded.
My grandpa sent us this article today.
The Saudi government finally caught the “mastermind”:Â Ahmed al-Mughassil.
It all just reminded me of how brave my mamma is and how humbly she never mentions how much she’s done and experienced.
Like imagine you have a teenage daughter and she’s giving you attitude (*cough*). “Well, daughter, you cannot complain about your sister’s mess because I was in a BOMBING). It’s not perfectly logical, but still — might work.
I love my mamma. 🙂
I’m so tired. Today, I had Calculus 3 at 8:30 and stayed at school until 7:00, when Calculus Based Physics ended. Then I went to youth group and have only just gotten home.
And my classes have all got so much homework.
And I don’t even know what my schedule should be for college applications and scholarships and stuff.
And I just feel like I have so many uncompleted things.
It’s just now hitting me that school is not optional. I can’t just decide not to go. I am literally stuck with all these classes for the next thirteen weeks, until Thanksgiving.
Let me go shrivel up in bed.
I’m starting my senior year tomorrow.
I’m definitely more scared than excited.
This is such a cross-roads year. I’m terrified that I’ll be too busy all year.
But this is my saddest point: I don’t have a break from school until November 23. That’s 13 weeks away. Ouch. And at that point the teachers are going to assign a ton of homework for the break and I’m going to be frantically applying to colleges.
Yay.
So goodnight, dear reader. My last goodnight of summer.
Cecilia Joy 