A Thankful Heart

Being Thanksgiving, I thought I'd share what I am thankful for this year.  I'm thankful for how much God has blessed me with great friends (new and old) and family and many other blessings of things as simple or maybe even cheesy as a place to live or having a job. Also, I know my whole family is thankful for my Granddaddy getting through heart surgery well, even though he's still recovering and we wished he could have enjoyed thanksgiving dinner with us. This and another situation with my friend's family, makes me even more thankful for good health that God gives us and the help of great doctors and advanced medicine.  I could never go into that field for many reasons and really admire those who do.
Also, with so many tragedies that have happened recently, specifically up at JMU, I have learned to be thankful simply for life when life can so quickly end at any moment.

A great verse that I found today is 1 Thessalonians 5:18 which is "...give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus."  I certainly can apply this to my life because I should be thankful for every situation I'm in and know that it is all in God's will, like the example I gave and also for other things in my life whether it's the fun times with friends or the stress of staying on track in school.

P.S. Another thing I have to add to what I'm thankful for, on a less serious note (but no actually I am seriously thankful for), is razors..like seriously I had no idea how much I was going to miss using one this month-"no shave november", which my roommate and I both decided to do.

Well hey it's been awhile (and that's def. not exaggerated)!
So I'd say that a lot has happened since I last wrote on here (so I will do a run-down on what I've been up to and especially say where my heart is)..
First of all freshman year came to a close too soon and yet at the same time I was glad and then there was a great summer of no stress of school, catching up with a few friends, making new ones where I work, visiting one my good friends from Jmu, going to the beach with my family, and reading all 7 Harry Potter books finally! Through all that I was not very disciplined in my faith like I had started being at school in the spring, probably because I was just in that lazy summer mood (except when I had to work a lot to save up money and keep busy). So that made it great that when I came back to school, my small group was going to study the spiritual disciplines including ones I don't have much practice in like fasting.  Though I am definitely working through still becoming more disciplined even with this semester being a little more stressful dealing with my major and anything else making me struggle, I remind myself that I shouldn't do it just because we're supposed to but because we want to and need to and I can definitely say that I really need to, not just sometimes but continually!
Other things that have happened since being back at school have included fun times with my awesome crazy suite mates that I am blessed to have- going to pick sunflowers on campus wearing all black, some of us dying our hair with pink streaks (or in my case red), our typical movie nights on most weekends, and other crazy random moments:) Oh and another random adventure was contra dancing (which is basically just folk dancing) not with any of the suite mates but laura, someone else I will live with next year. I definitely enjoy these moments because I would go crazy! I love being an art major but in my design methodology class has definitely been testing me and the professor even admitted it might be like design bootcamp and that is for sure, but now all of our projects are done and I just have to go back and make changes here and there now that I know what I'm doing.  Now I'm just trusting God on the issue of having not been able to get into the next class I need to move on in my major.
So I will update soon on how that goes and on my spiritual disciplines too!