Sitting at the beach...

Sitting at the beach, house bound due to a little bit of sunburn I thought I should return to my love for blogging...

Thomas Christmas in June this year brought the family to our friend's condo on the beach an adventure never been embarked upon before but hopefully will become tradition!

This has been an incredible week of sun, tennis, and lots of fun! Although today is ruff because I couldn't even put a sports bra on this morning without excruciating pain forcing me to cancel our morning tennis match, there is nothing I have to complain about.

This week has been a wonderful time of bonding and sharing memories that will never be forgotten. I am blessed beyond measure with an incredible family filled with love, success, joy, and oh so much more!

It was all so bitter sweet...

It was all so bitter sweet...

As I walked across the stage, shaking the hand of the Dean of Arts and Sciences as well as President Leeland while being given congratulations on my accomplishments, I realized how surreal this moment in time was.

It doesn't feel any different...maybe because my schooling chapter is not closing for good in fact the page is simply turning or maybe it is just the same feeling that comes each year as another birthday rolls on by with little feeling of change. Either way I'm not sure what to think or how to feel as I poor through the memories that made up my GCSU experience.

The memories still so vivid take me on a five year road trip through the time in my life where I found Jill Marie!

18 years old I moved into a tiny dorm room that I shared with a high school friend...it was a scary begining to an exciting time...I quickly found a home in ministry with BCM at the time BSU...I joined the Impact team, a group that went around to local churches doing services of all kinds to help raise money for summer missions, after just a few short months as an avid team member I became the leader...this became the challenge of a lifetime and a trying period in my life as I dealt with college students as well as adults...I grew and I learned, my leadership skills flourished and burned in flames all at the same time...Impact team though incredible for a season was just that a season that came and went in my life...God had other things in store...I made friends easily and found a comfortable place within the GCSU community...my major was challenging academically as well as spiritually and the people around me seemed to be lost in a world I could not completely comprehend...these friends led to the oppurtunity for me to be asked to join in the sisterhood of PHI MU fraternity...the BEST decision of my life!...from there the memories poor out like a rushing waterfall, from formals to socials to ritual to tears to recruitment to love to honor to truth to sisters to family, things I never dreamed of...as my active Phi Mu membership progressed into alumni status God works was yet to be finished...in my last months on campus my life was poored into a small and intimate Bible study that proved to be one of my fondest college memories...

I say it was all bitter sweet because I leave a piece of me behind but gain a piece of me to carry on from the experience of what a college oppurtunity is all about...

It is with an overwhelmingly joyful heart that I get to share the testimony of a lifetime...

The Sunday before Easter my world came crashing down as my parents delivered the news that I had been wait listed for the nursing program at Georgia State. I was hurting, feeling as though God was no longer in control and that I had missed His purpose and plan for my life. Graduating in just a few short weeks with NO plan for tomorrow. My job and housing in Milledgeville would remain intact until the end of July but then the unknown burdened my life like the spance of the ocean. Looking off into the horizon there was a dim future, one I had not imagined. Little did I know that in the midst of my tears of sorrow and doubt God was preparing the way for me...

M. Cagle, family friend, called that same Sunday extending an invite to Easter brunch. This was uncharacteristic because for the Cagle's Easter was always a family occasion. Mom of course accepted the invitation graciously. M. Cagle during her invite mentioned that her aunt the Deen of students at Mercer Atlanta and former RN would be at brunch as well. To M. Cagle, who had no idea of the struggles I was going through with nursing school, she simply thought good conversation would flow through the group.

After a brief introduction Dyes, Deen at Mercer, and I were deep into conversation about my passion for nursing. I went into detail about my struggles and my disappointments. My dad stood close by almost acting as my wing man (Thank you dad for your silent encouragement, for your questions at all the right moments, and for your never ending confidence in my abilities!) supporting and leading the conversation into even deeper bowels. Dyes was an incredible encouragement, reminding that perseverance is key to obtaining the goal. Little did I know that Dyes was providing me with a jewel. Vines a coworker and friend of Dyes is the Director of Admissions for nursing at Mercer. Dyes gave me Vines' email address and told me I should contact her with the information I had told her today. An email turned into a phone call, which turned into an application process, which led to God opening the door He wanted me to walk through...

"CONGRATULATIONS! You have been accepted into the nursing program at Georgia Baptist College of Nursing of Mercer University for the semester FALL 2009. You have the opportunity to become part of a distinctive tradition of nursing."

This all happened within a matter of about three weeks...God is so incredible...His timing perfection.

The coolest part to me about this incredible act of God in my life is that through it all someone else was being just as blessed if not more blessed than I was. M. Cagle was responding to a tug on her heart by the Lord when she invited us for brunch. At the time NO one except the Lord new about the events that would unfold. As I tearfully told M. Cagle of my acceptance into nursing school there was silence on the other end of the line. Finally I could hear the soft russell of a woman with tears streaming down her face. Tears like those shed by the woman washing Jesus' feet. They were tears of remembrance of who He is, tears of a thankful heart, tears to testify. M. Cagle needed this blessing from the Lord, she needed to be used by Him in a mighty way. Thank you M. Cagle for being so willing to answer the call of the Lord. You were not just a pawn in the eyes of the Lord but a willing vessel to be used by the King.

"I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future." Jeremiah 29:11

Today is another day...

Today is another day, a day filled with hope in what seems like a hopeless point in life. Hopeless may not be the best word because in reality the world lays at my fingertips just waiting for me to grab hold and conquer what lies ahead.

Easter Sunday in all its overwhelming glory brought about a renewed since of perseverance in my life. As I stood in the kitchen of close family friends and met some of their extended family God paved the way for hope to be restored. The quiet conversations, the laughter, the popping of champagne bottles filled the background noise of a conversation that might just change my future. CCD the dean of students at Mercer Atlanta listened intently as I poured out my heart about my passions and my disappointments. Her words simple encouragements with one large grain of hope...the email address of the director of admissions for Mercer nursing school. An email later, a phone call, and one incredible God opened the doors for me to apply for the Fall '09 nursing program at Mercer.

The future is still uncertain but just as in Lamentations 3 where Jeremiah reminds us that the sorrows of yesterday bring the hope of today!

I can look back on yesterday and see all the Lord has done and know that his faithfulness is new EVERY morning. He hears our cries and answers but just as our parents for so long have heard our cries and answered it's not always the answer we desire.

I've not been guaranteed entrance into Mercer and have not even been given a false hope on human terms but on the terms of my Heavenly Father I am given hope through remembrance.

I have spent the last five years...

Nursing Essay
I have spent the last five years realizing that the healthcare community needs a dedicated staff that are not just working for a pay check. My college career began on a one way track to medical school but a couple of years in I realized being the doctor was not all it was cracked up to be. I found that most of the time doctors had little interaction time with the patient and that the day in and day out work was left up to the nursing staff. As I spent hours in the hospital doing what I thought was shadowing doctors, I soon realized that I was actually shadowing the nurses. These hours redirected my one-way path to medical school onto a slightly different path to nursing school.
Biology has opened my eyes to the world around me in an entirely new light. It has made me look at life systematically and question the things around me. My BS in Biology was my first educational goal but it was never my only goal. Throughout the last five years I have longed to learn about the body and all that it encompasses. Becoming a registered nurse is only the first step in a bigger plan for me.
Since before I can remember I have been passionate about serving people, so when it came time to decide on a career path I wanted something that would marry my passion for serving with my desire to work. Healthcare was the answer. Initially I did not know to what degree this would be, but as the years have unfolded I have found myself longing for more and more healthcare education. Although I have enjoyed my time as biology major, I am inspired to learn about medicine. When I’m in the hospital, or working at Dr. Garnto’s office, I am like a sponge just longing for someone to drop even an ounce of knowledge on me that I can soak in. Education brings knowledge, and knowledge brings quality service.
I have had the great honor of working alongside two nurse practitioners at the Compassionate Care Clinic in Milledgeville, GA. This clinic is a nurse-conceived, nurse-led primary indigent healthcare clinic funded by the Georgia Baptist Health Care Ministry Foundation. These nurse practitioners have instilled in me the desire to achieve more and to raise the bar high. They have allowed me to talk through patient’s primary complaints to begin to determine diagnosis and plan of action, teaching me how to think like a provider. Through formal training by a phlebotomist I have acquired the skill sets necessary to draw blood on patients of all ages, varying in body habitus. Also through time spent working with these nurse practitioners I have been able to dip my hands into the vast world of pharmacology. We have discussed the pros and cons of differing blood pressure, insulin, cholesterol, and psychiatric medications determining which is best for the individual patient allowing my pharmaceutical knowledge to grow. All of these individual things draw me into the field of nursing and even more so inspire me to go beyond registered nurse to nurse practitioner.
Working at the Compassionate Care Clinic has rekindled my desire to serve the underprivileged, especially those in third world countries. I have been around the world and back serving the Lord in all capacities but medicine is my link from the physical to the spiritual. Medicine opens up opportunities to enter people’s lives in a truly honest capacity; relating their need for physical healing to the spiritual and physical healing of the Great Physician, Jesus Christ. Mountains Beyond Mountains is a book that portrays the life of Paul Farmer, M.D. In this book the author describes how Dr. Farmer spends four months a year as a professor at Harvard medical school and the rest of the time in Haiti working around the clock at Zanme Lasante, a healthcare system serving over 100,000 in its catchment area. Dr. Farmer inspires me to take hold of my love and call for missions and go to any extreme to see it come to fruition. Nursing school is the first step in achieving my ultimate goal of bringing healthcare to those without.

The twist and turns of life...

The twist and turns of life are inevitable, lacking in preidctability.

What comes next is the question that lingers on the mind of every individual crossing the stage of their college graduation. In my mind I always believed it would be nursing school but God must have other plans or at least other plans for this moment in time.

I've struggled with the disheartening emotoins of rejection and embarrassment as the door for nursing school has not YET been opened. I use YET because I know where my passion lies and that in God's timing he will give me the desires of my heart, i have only to be patient.

Spring Break '09...

Spring Break '09 was just another day at the office but with some added spontaneous moments. I had planned to spend Tuesday night in Macon with my dear friend racequ for dinner and some cherry blossom festivities. I got off work on Monday and called racequ to catch up and plan events for Tuesdays when she said that she was going to see Slumdog Millionaire with my double mint twin who I had not seen in quite some time. On a whim I decided to spend my evening with friends, spontaneous I know but a good change for me! The movie was not what I expected but blew me away in its ability to take me on an emotional roller coaster. We walked out of the movie, which by the way we were the only three people in the theater, to an almost empty parking lot. Chatting away we saw an unidentified male take trash out of his car and put it on the ground...

this does not make me happy...

so I decided that we should teach this young couple a little lesson...(in hind site I should have taken the trash and thrown it away because I am sure it just ended up scattered around the parking lot but none the less I thought it might make them think the next time they decide to litter)

So spring break '09 started out with little potential for anything fun or exciting but with a little spontaneity a week of fun began!

Tuesday night turned into an exciting time when Mr. inc., one of my dear friends invited to join me on my Tuesday night Macon journey, told me that he a secret love for sea lions. This came as a surprise for a couple of reasons:

#1 he is in his 20's

#2 who even knows about sea lions?

He later explained to racequ and I that when he lived in California there were some near him and he went to see them a lot or something to that extent. Anyway so knowing his love for the sea lions we decided that we would go and see the sea lions at the Cherry Blossom Festival, they were surprisingly a fairly popular attraction.

We then ate dinner at a quaint little Italian place in downtown Macon, the food was good and the company was wonderful!

So all in all spring break '09 was one spent watching friendships blossoms as time was spent with these extraordinary people!

Life has been wonderful...

Life has been wonderful, well other than being sick for three weeks. About a two months ago I had a long conversation with one of my BCM friends. After this conversation, almost totally focused on the past two years of my life as a Phi Mu, she asked me to speak at an upcoming BCM. I didn't give her an answer that night because I was really unsure about it at the time. In all honesty I was hoping she would forget she even asked...

But lo and behold she sends me a facebook message. She tells me topic of the night she wants me to speak is "eyes that see the opportunities around me." Fitting for a sorority girl"s testimony. Several days went by and after counseling with several friends I felt God give the ok...

On came the nerves, the what ifs, and what does God really want me to say. As time got closer and closer I had been jotting some things down here or there but nothing conclusive, so Sunday night before I was to speak on Tuesday I broke it all down, wrote it all, and searched deep into the word of God. By Tuesday night I was overwhelmed by what God had revealed to me and overwhelmed with the difficult direction he was taking my talk into. I have never been one to care about stepping on people's toes but for some reason I thought some of the things I might talk about would crush toes instead of just bruise them. Why I doubt God and His plan I will never know but He is incredibly faithful...

Tuesday night came and I had a complete since of peace, well until the room started to fill up! Let me just say God was waiting for me when I walked up to that music stand. He spoke through in an incredible way, in a way I didn't think was possible. We started in Matthew 28:28-20 where we are told to go. Then we were reminded about how we were created in the image of God in Genesis 1:27. Next we ate with Jesus and the tax collectors in Matthew 9:9-12 and Luke 15:1-7 because we needed to be reminded that it is not the righteous who need to be eating with the Lord but the unrighteous and how Jesus built relationships with these people. John 17:6-26 Jesus prays for his disciples and future believers where we are shown to be in the world not of it and that we are to be unified with the trinity because that is our catalyst and example for relational ministry. Avalon speaks clearly about being in not of the world in there song "in not of." But even the righteous make mistakes and so instead of being sharpened by believers I was being sharpened by the world Proverbs 27:17. Building relationship with unbelievers can be difficult especially when we see what God says about the plank in your own eye in Luke 6:37-42. God says he will never leave you nor forsake you...how true this verse is when the very people I was scared would have crushed toes welcomed me with open arms, others came crying for the changes they knew they needed to make, and still others just said thanks...so again why do I doubt God's plan, I will never know.

It wasn't just my opportunity to speak at BCM that has made life wonderful it is also my Monday night Bible study. God continues to blow me away with what he is doing with this intimate group of girls. But it is not just what happens on Monday nights but it is what takes place in between. We love, we support, we listen, we care. These girls are incredible and they have so much to offer. I am overly blessed to call them my friends. Each of their individual personalities warms my heart in a very unique way filling me up in the ways only sisters in Christ could!

A cup of coffee...

A cup of coffee made my morning as I sat relaxing on the couch. I have not been able to do this in so long I had almost forgotten how much I enjoy it. Still sore from the craziest greek week ever (3 football games and 3 soccer games = too much for this 23 year old body!)

(WE GOT FIRST IN BOTH THESE SPORTS! PHI MU HELL YEAH!)

and my first biological systematics test and my senior exit exam, I needed this quiet morning to relax and kick up my heels! I could not be more grateful for this relaxing time and it could not come on a better day!

Signed, sealed, and mailed...

Signed, sealed, and mailed. My application for the GSU nursing program was mailed today! (It is pending my acceptance to GSU and them recieving all the transcripts and test results I have requested to be sent.) This has been a long process that I am so glad is finally over. It is liberating and scary all at the same time. I am scared of the rejection that may come but I know that God is in control and He is going to put me exactly where He wants me but even being confident in this knowledge rejection is still a very real feeling. Now I can only pray that God will open and close the doors around me so I know clearly what His plan is!

Well it's official...

Well it's official...I can graduate! Today was dooms day in so many ways. To graduate I had to PASS the exit exam. The passing score is 140...I have no idea what this is out of or why this is the magic number. As I sat in a computer lab with fellow students all around me I prayed my way through 2 hours and 150 questions that the last 5 years of my life had been preparing me for...Now let me be honest here for a min...many of my nights studying were really cram sessions and retention was not always my intention. Let me just tell you as I sat there and guessed at 50% of these questions I had a since of peace that God was in control! What an incredible feeling that is! God brought me out of the dooms day not with flying colors but with a perfect score of 140! Praise the Lord! He is an incredible God and never ceases to reassure me that I Corinthians 4:13 is oh so very true!

Just another day at the office...

Yesterday, was just another day at the office, so I thought. It has been an absolutely crazy week. I have been sick with a terrible cold and two of my coworkers have been out of the office. One of them is out of town the other is out with a sick baby. So in the middle of the day yesterday Pope starts screaming from the back office that a car is on fire next door, i drop everything and go running to the back to see what is going on. Low and behold there is a late model suburban on fire. 911 was called and it took them 15mins to respond. A volunteer fireman showed up but there was nothing he could do because he didn't have any equipment.

The fire was put out and this is what was left...

The crazy thing about this is that the damage could have been minor had the fire department responded in a more timely manor.

God is teaching me...

As my undergraduate college journey comes to an end I find that God is teaching me more now than ever before.

God has recently opened the door for me to start a Bible study for a group of girls. Tonight was our first time together and God never ceases to amaze me in his ability to orchestrate exactly what I need. I never believed that I would learn more from these girls than they would learn from me but I already have. Tonight we started with sharing our lives with each other, openly and honestly sharing all of life's joys and sorrows, are mistakes and our victories. We met on common ground, encouraging each other, crying with each other, laughing with each other. Our lives are entertwined in ways I did not think imaginable.

I have been study Malachi in my quiet time and as a group we decided that is where our journey together would begin. God recently lead me to this incredible little book that gets looked over. Through the few short pages that make up this Old Testament book I have been convicted and loved by the Lord in mighty ways. He talks about the priest and how their sacrifices were not the best and through this I have been convicted that I have not been giving God my best. He has been getting my leftovers instead of a plate made for the King. I am thankful that my God can continue to forgive me for the same things over and over again. I have so much yet to learn and though this is in some ways a scary thing I am so excited to see what is waiting around the corner!

DM for the kids...

DM for the kids 2009 has come to close with $30,244.75 riased for CMN; the largest amount yet!

As life unfolds...

As life unfolds before me and my present becomes my past and my future becomes my present I realize change is inevitable. My closest friends enter the real world with jobs others begin to say "I do" while I seem to be left in the midst of a world that is not my own. As a chapter begins to close the next is left uncertain. Where is love, companionship, and all that comes next? I was beginning to feel alone in this chapter but God quickly reminded me otherwise.

I spent this past weekend with a group of friends smack dab in the middle of the chapter. Old and new we find ourselves struggling with the same things coming to grips with the uncertainty of what turning the page may do.

I'm not sure what comes next: nursing, PA, Africa, some other unknown location where God may send me, I don't know but I am patiently waiting for God to open and close the doors around me.

Thank you to my friends who unknowingly lifted my spirits in a way I wasn't sure anyone could. Thank you for bringing laughter in an abundance, for making me remember the good old days, and encouraging me that life's chapters begin and end at different points and that my chapter is perfectly written by my Creator I just have to let him be the pen and the editor.