When life gives you an amazing youth minister...

It's just like the old saying, "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade." But in this case, it's "When life gives you an amazing youth minister, spend two hours in her office analyzing your life." One-on-ones with Sara are one of my favorite things ever. We could seriously spend a whole day just talking in her office... But when you have to be home by 6-ish to eat dinner with your fam, we find a way to squeeze it into a two hour time frame. We can actually cover quite a bit of ground in that time. You never know what's gonna come up in our conversations... Anything from the art of the "shaky face" pictures, to topics to discuss at FLOCK, to how we found out Santa's not real (sad day...), to The Hangover and Elf, to Prayer and Action, and to some actually deep stuff like relationships, prayer, adoration, camp, and who knows what else. But that's exactly what I love about me and Sara's relationship -- one second we're being goofy and joking around, but five seconds later she's giving me advice about anything and everything: telling me stories about her own experiences, helping me edit a speech, guiding me through the little things that come up in life, and basically coaching me through everything. Sara, I want you to know that I really appreciate all you've done for me and just always being there as someone to talk to about whatever life throws at me. I legimately don't think that I would be who I am today if I hadn't met you back at GET REAL in 5th grade and gotten to know you and build up our friendship. So thanks. A ton. God really blessed all of us FLOCKers with two ridiculously awesome youth ministers, and we all really look up to you guys. Keep rockin' it and being yourselves. We <3 you.

(Bringing back some Prayer and Action memories) ... For random, deep, long, epic conversations at St. Michael's... GOD IS GREAT. :]

Love is an ability, not an emotion.

Last night was Sex & Dating night at FLOCK (where we talk about, but don't actually do either of those two things).  It's probably one of the most highly anticipated FLOCK nights of the year. Pretty legit. So of course, it was fantastic. But what I loved is that we talked about it from a totally different perspective than we ever have before - that you have to know yourself and what you want before you can ever even think about finding and giving yourself to someone else. So obviously there was a game to go with this idea of "knowing more about ourselves." And during this game, we learned that Justin has gotten a speeding ticket in the last year, that Sara has peed her pants from laughing too hard, that Mike blames his farts on his dog (even though he doesn't have a dog?), and so many more ridiculous things about our fellow FLOCKers...

So all fun and games right? Sure. Until Aaron, Sara, and Mike got up and shared with us some of their actual dating experiences. Can you say, "We have the greatest youth ministers ever?" I can. We have the greatest youth ministers ever. For real. Just that they were willing to get up there in front of all of us and tell us about things that they've been through is super duper awesome. And we learned a lot from, at least I did. But my favorite quote of the night was when Mike was talking about love. "Love is an ability, not an emotion." Then he eplained how that "perfect person" isn't going to be standing right there in the moonlight with all the stars twinkling all perfectly and whatnot (and there were some pretty hilarious actions to go along with that...). But his point was: When you take away all the emotions and great feelings that love give you, you have to ask yourself, "Why am I dating this person? Because I just want to say that I have a boyfriend or girlfriend? Or because this other person and I seriously have common goals and help eachother grow and be the best people we can be?" Obviously we want to strive for the second answer, but that's the whole challenge that we all face in today's society. We can fall into today's popular trends of dating just to date, or we can wait (like Brian did so he could get 10 bucks instead of one...) and be patient and let God decide when we're ready for that someone to be a part of our lives. The key is: knowing who we are, what we want, and not settling for anything less than what God wants for us.

Alright. "Operation Trust in God" is a GO. We can do this (with His help of course). :]