Grace Writing

To start off - THIS IS OFFICIALLY MY FIFTIETH POST!!! I'm so excited! Thank all of you for supporting me and reading my blogs, and know that I couldn't have gotten this far without every single one of you. I look forward to seeing you and talking to you more and more as I continue to write these posts! And now onto "Why We Won't Be Celebrating Halloween This Year" . . . A lot of Christians don't celebrate Halloween, and I respect their decision, but I, personally, LOVE Halloween. It's one of my absolute favorite holidays (besides Christmas, which obviously comes first because it's just so amazing). I mean, you get free candy and people don't look at you weird for putting on a costume. I could do a whole post about how weird the idea of Halloween is - I mean, all it is is that you aren't technically trespassing on someone's lawn when you go up to their door and bang on it, begging for sweets while dressed like some sort of fict...

I've learned a lot from watching my Mom and Dad's marriage. It's led me to know what I want to look for in a marriage, eventually, when I'm older, if I ever DO get married. Their marriage helps me know what a marriage is really about, and I couldn't thank them more for that. You see, a lot of girls my age dream about marrying the perfect guy. Living in the perfect house. Having a lot of money and clothes and having a happy family and good, stable jobs. I'm not saying that that's a bad thing, but I think it's a bit unrealistic. It's not impossible, I suppose (other than the perfect guy, thing. Nobody's perfect! *Hannah Montana song now stuck in my head forever*), but in order to have all those things, you need to have a few others. So, here's what I want for my future, if I ever get married. Jesus. Not every marriage has Jesus, and a lot of them do okay without Him. But it's a lot harder, I think. Without Jesus, who do you have as...

      The world seems much nicer at first glance than it does when you look deeper into it.    It looks like a fairy tale when you first see it. It feels welcoming and loving when you're a child, and then the older you get the more you recognize the evil that inhabits it.    When I visited Thailand on our vision trip, I saw that evil for the first time in my life. I was around eleven.    I remember walking into the Buddhist temple, having left my shoes outside as they were not allowed to be worn indoors. I walked quietly over the cold marble floor through the dark room and lowered myself to the ground, looking around me in awe. I came as a tourist, but others came to worship.    What did they worship?    A green statue. The Emerald Buddha, it's called. All around me Thai people bowed low to the floor as medieval peasants would in front of a king, their hands palm-down on the floor in front of them in wor...