Fall 2013

School started and I'm not sure how much I look forward to this coming semester. I feel like there is just TOO much going on. Of course, I'm grateful to be in the place where I am right now. God literally blessed me with every single thing I had asked for. Now I just need to learn how to balance all of it without getting burnt out. My schedule starts at 9AM everyday and ends either 7, 8, or 9PM. Sometimes I wonder what I've done to myself. I'm going to have to be dealing with this for two years. At the same time, I'm grateful to have such opportunities. One thing I know for sure is that I'm going to have to make a lot of sacrifices. I also want to have enough time for myself to have some rest.

The past month has been difficult. It was my first time experience registration season at the job and wow, we really don't get a chance to breathe because everyone just happens to be last minute. Registration week affected me physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. Everything. I felt like I couldn't catch my breath and by the end of the day, I was just so exhausted which caused me to feel unproductive in every aspect of my life. I thank God for such a great husband to make my life easier in so many ways. Without him, I'd probably collapse. I'm not sure if it's normal for a job to overwork people in this way, but it's definitely a learning experiencing. I've learned my mistakes from this year and am going to figure out a way to become more efficient by next year.

Tomorrow's my first day of actually sitting in the counselor position. All this time, I've been learning all this book knowledge about counseling, and now I actually get to put it into practice. There's so many emotions going on because it's my first time. I have a bunch of clients lined up already, more than I had expected for the first couple of weeks of school. And God willing, if this goes well, I won't need many more clients to fill up my time slots.

This is not going to be an easy semester. God, please help me as I strive to be faithful and excellent in all the things you are calling me to do. I already feel the stress, I already feel the burden, but may I find peace in you as I do all of this.

Stress

There are periods of my life where I just feel really stressed and overwhelmed by things, for some reason this week was one of them. I think about it, and I feel like I lay it all on myself and I'm too hard on myself that it makes it hard to handle. But at the same time, it's so meaningless because there's no need to be stressed at all because I know that my life is not my own and I'm not in control. But it's interesting because the pattern seems to be that when I get to these times, I'm forced to rely on God even more so than I usually do and all of a sudden, God does something miraculous and I get knocked off my get about how amazing he is. 

My commute

In a normal week, the typical time I set aside for bible reading and prayer is during my commute back and forth from the city. Although not an ideal spot to spend my alone times with God, but that's when I have my me myself and I time. Over the weekend, I took a day off work to go to six flags. I had a great time but one thing it did take me off of was my  normal routine. I realize that when I don't read the bible and pray, my day feels different, it feels empty, I feel a little anxious. It's weird, but just like I need  to feed myself with physical food, I need to intentionally feed myself with spiritual food as well. Normally, I always have the other pray for us before we go to sleep every night but the past couple of days, we had been coming home so late at night that it causes us to be too tired to do anything. It makes a difference in how I sleep, how I wake up, everything. 

Also, I have a coworker that often tells me that she wakes up early in the morning to "pray things through". I give her a lot of props for doing that because its very difficult for me to wake myself up at a certain time to do anything. Over the weekend, I sort of felt that way... Where I feel like I needed and wanted to pray things through, I'd feel like something is missing if I didn't and part of me was glad that the weekday was coming again so that I could go back to my normal routine.

A lot of times I feel like my coworker talks too much. Although a very spiritual lady, I'm still fairly new at my job and the learning process slows me down from completing what I'm supposed to on one. Many times, she gets caught up in telling me a story, and those stories are great and all because they're always intended to be an encouraging story, but as a new employee, I'm still learning and I can't pay attention to talking and my work at the same time. Well, although I feel that way every so often, she does speak a lot of truth. Example: I often tell her that my wrist hurts from sitting at the computer too long and I feel like I have carpel tunnel syndrome. She immediately responds, "don't claim it". That's true, why in the world am I claiming pain onto my body. This weekend, I was more intentional about not claiming something like that because it becomes psychosomatic and all in my mind. 

Anyway, every time I have my phone around me, I'll squeeze in looking at instagram or Facebook or the like, not for any particular reason, but just for the sake of scrolling through pictures on social media website. For some reason, I felt like this weekend, I was on social media very often, and it's actually pretty draining and I get just about nothing out of it. I think I'm gonna make a deal with myself to only go on social media once a day. Actually, I'm just tired of looking at my phone and checking it all the time, such a bad habit.

God I commit this day to you, I want to start off my morning by giving it over to you. 

Balancing and Adjusting

From the outside perspective, it seems like I hang out with the others friends much more than mine. As I reflect on who we spend the most time with, it's actually our family members. Both of us seem to have a lot of family members and they take up most of our free days, which essentially is Saturday. We both see our family members very often and I appreciate that we have a good relationship with them. Although it is unfortunate because there are so many friends to catch up with and hang out with, but unfortunately there is only one available day of the week (at least for now because of the school schedule and life adjustments). And on top of that, I love making new friends and sometimes I wonder why I do that because its already hard to maintain relationships with those I already have aside through technology. Still trying to figure out a good balance. 

One major change since being married is the financial factor. Although I try not to make it a stressor in my life because I know that if I'm wise with my finances and if I know that God always provides, I shouldn't be worried, I still do. The biggest thing is just more responsibility and more bills, and now I actually have to be mindful of what we are spending our money on in order to be sure that we will have enough to pay bills and such throughout the month. Since being in the financial peace class, I've been intentionally thinking about budgeting and how to handle my money. It's been quite difficult but it'll take a couple of months to find a balance of what to spend where. The past month, I haven't touched my credit card or my wallet, and the only thing we've really spent money on is our necessary expenses like grocery shopping, travel and bills. It feels good to bring healthy food from home every day and not have to buy city priced food from the deli. The only hard part I'm having trouble budgeting is the "hang out and entertainment" expenses. It seems like there's not much wiggle room to go out to eat at restaurants and such but many times it seems like its inevitable because there's always a persons birthday to go to or a special event to attend. I'm so privileged to have great friends to be able to attend events all the time but I'm still learning a balance. But, I realize that I love eating at home cooked food. 

One thing I love about the other and I is that we can fun without the use of substance. Yesterday we went to a birthday party at a lounge and it was casual and alcohol involved. Watching him dance around, being entertaining and not needing to use alcohol to have fun was a blessing to me. I love that we truly find joy in The Lord and can have fun anytime and everywhere. 

One thing I'm not really looking forward to is this coming Fall semester. I already feel the stress and the pressure of the crazy schedule I'm going to have and the amount of time I'm going to invest at work, internship, school, and that's just the least of it. My work schedule in the summer has been pretty hectic even with just forty hour work weeks. Work is never boring, there's always something to do, there's actually never enough time to finish anything, even working overtime and trying to finish work. I put so much heart into work that after work I become so exhausted.

There are many times recently where I purposely become unproductive after work hours and not want to do anything because I'm just tired and exhausted from a long day. This fairly new job, this new married life, the upcoming internship, the finishing of school, there's so many adjustments and I'm still learning to balance everything. 

Truth & Love

Today's small group was interesting. The funniest thing was when three guys were fighting about what was right for a guy who was struggling. All of them were giving their own feedback and confess.

One was emphasizing on the scripture and talking about hope through scripture.

Another one was using scripture as well and using his own personal life experiences.

The other one didn't agree with both of them and told them both to shut up. He told the guy that there's nothing any of us could do and talking won't solve anything. He told the guy to just give up.

Anyway, it became very tense and intense for a couple of minutes but the result was that all of us realized how much care and love everyone had for each other.

One guy was speaking truth to the person's life.

The other guy was speaking love into the person's life.

The last guy who doing both.

All of it was necessary.

There were so many emotions today. But only through the tenseness and seriousness was everyone able to see the heart that all of them had for the guy who was struggling.

Another interesting thing I noticed today was that the past month, each small group focused on one particular person each week. It wasn't intentional, everything just happened naturally, but there was always a topic that came up that focused on one person's issues and dealing with them and praying over them. All of them led to very serious talks that required us to give it up to Christ and draw us closer to Christ.

God is amazing. He meets all of us in such personal and unique ways.

Lastly, this small group has been going on for exactly a year (and two weeks to be exact). This small group has went a long way. I shared with them what our first prayer requests were when we first started this small group and every single prayer request has been answered since last year. It's amazing to see where God can bring a small group in a year for as long as we just make ourselves available to meet.

In so many ways, this is church for so many of them. This is a place where people are able to be themselves, speak openly and still be God centered. It's edifying, encouraging and most of all, God moves, it's crazy. We have shared so many emotions with one another, we have shared ups and downs together during small group time together, we've witnessed prayer, laughter, tears, anger, care, appreciation, friendship, all different types of food, everything!

I look forward to how God is going to work this group. I'm exciting to see how everything will look like years from now. When I look at the small group, I have so much hope. I can so see all of them work together in the ministry in the long run to build the body of Christ and reach out to more people.