Why I Switched my Major....

Once you enter college the one question that everyone always asks you when they meet you is
"What is your major?"
Next to your name, your major is the next thing that everyone wants to know about you. It almost becomes a part of your identity and a part of who you are. It effects who you interact with, what professors you'll have and what types of groups you'll be involved in.

So after going through the majority of college as a science major with the intention of becoming an Occupational Therapist, that's what everyone knew me as. I was a science girl and I was going to be an OT. And that was that. People thought it was an awesome career choice and I was often applauded for it, & told how smart I was. I was going to go to graduate school and get to help people and join a rising, stable, good, paying career; and people were proud of me for it.

However, I was creating a whole life plan based on my own comfort and wants. What I neglected to do was to seek God to ask him what his plan for my life was. & then he came in and wrecked my heart.

This summer as I spent time in a different culture, saw brokenness and pain up close in a real tangible way and dug into God's word and really sought him and his guidance for my life he directed my path to the field of social work. I wrestled with changing my major, but he continued to keep opening up doors and directing my path. I realized that I wanted to help people. To be able to bring hope and light and joy to those who have none and are in some of the darkest situations. I want to use my life to love and serve others, to do all that I can to make a difference in the world. & for me that means working in the non-profit sector and seeking to work with exploited children and human trafficking.

So yes, maybe I will be taking a big salary cut with my new choice of major, and joining a career that has a lot less prestige attached to it and yes maybe I will have to change everything that I have worked so hard on and start from scratch this year as I enter into the social work program. However, God is so faithful and he has led me this far and opened up the door for me to be accepted into this program and I may not know exactly what lays in store for me 2 years from now, but I know where God has led me to for this moment and I am simply taking it step by step and following his leading.

I cannot wait to grow in this new field of social work and learn what it looks like to enter into this helping profession, and I am so excited to see how I will be able to use my skills to help people and spread God's love.

So here's to this new major, new adventure and new future!

Hi my name's Becca and I'm a social work major. 

Think Twice Before You Apply That Lipstick....

“Every day thousands of women buy makeup & thousands of Indian children are forced to mine mica, the sparkles in the makeup.” (slaveryfootprint.org)

Does this fact shock you? It sure took me aback as I sat there in the comfort and freedom of my home ironically wearing sparkly eye shadow as I read this information. I immediately wanted to run to the bathroom and wash all the make up off of my face.

I knew I couldn’t just read this fact, forget about it and continue on my merry little way. So I immediately started researching this issue.

Have you ever heard of Mica? Well let me tell you about this tiny little mineral that affects thousands of children’s lives a day. It’s the sparkle in your favorite make up that children spend hours beating out of a stone.

Mica- is a transparent mineral that is mined from the earth in thin sheets, and it is often opalescent and sparkling, but can also be completely matte, and ranges in color from gray to blue to green (foriegnpolicyblogs).

One of the biggest uses for Mica is in cosmetics, such as eyeshadow, nail polish, lipstick, and concealer.

The impoverished hills of Jharkhand India, possesses one of the largest deposits of mica, and this is where children are exploited and forced to work in hard dangerous situations.

So now that you know this, what are you going to do about it? I began my quest for finding ethically made cosmetic products. And as I was searching and researching for ethically made make up without mica in it, I found out that it was a lot harder than I had thought.

However, what shocked and bothered me the most, was that during my research I found pages and pages of “ethically” and “cruelty free” cosmetic companies.  This is what these companies meant by this—that their products were not tested on animals and did not use any ingredients that were derived from animals or harmful chemicals. Here’s an example of this from the company that I found:

 

Here’s what bothers me the most: Since when are the lives and wellbeing of animals more important than that of a child? Why is the cosmetic industry more aware of and concerned with never using animal testing, but yet they don’t mind profiting off of the child slavery and exploitation that is going on across the world?

So maybe you should think twice before you apply that lipstick as you walk out the door? Because it should not take the sparkles on the hands of these children to make the rest of us in the world shimmer and shine.

For those of you who are interested in ethically made cosmetic, I am still researching different companies, but here are a few that I have found so far.

-The Body Shop

- Epic Mineral Beauty

Stay tuned as I learn more about ethically and fairly made cosmetic products.

Be still

Ever since I had my concussion last January God has been teaching me the importance of being quiet. Something that I am not very good at. My life is always bursting with school, work, friends, ministry, culture, media and noise!
I'm the girl who never slows down and is always bouncing around from one thing to the next. My mind is perpetually spinning with one thought after another, with a continuous flow of tasks and to-do lists. While I'm awake there is never even a moment of calm in my mind.

But listen to this simple truth that has been speaking deeply to my heart lately.

"Be still and know that I am God."

    -Psalm 46:10

Friends in the busyness of a new week remember that intimacy with God requires stillness, attentiveness and quiet. We have to get off the busy highway of life to grow closer to God! If our mind is constantly full of other things then when will we be able to hear from God and allow him to gently whisper to us and remind us of who he is!

Dear friends be purposeful in your day and week to be calm and quiet before God. I know it's hard and there's a million and one things fighting for our attention, but it is so worth the effort! I am praying God blesses all of you this week with sweet intimate time with him where you get to pause life and simply be still and know that he is God! He wants to breathe life and peace into your stressed, anxious, overwhelmed heart, will you let him?

By Grace...

So these past two weeks have been filled with follow up appointments.
Where I get to meet with awesome girls on my campus who are interested in Cru (our Christian student ministry). Most of them have been eager to get
involved and grow in their Christian faith and that makes my heart fill with joy.

However, there's one thing that has really stood out to me. Most of them are not 100% sure of their salvation and whether or not they would go to heaven and be with God for eternity. They list reasons why they think they would, such as going to church, trying to put God first, one girl even gave me an extensive list of volunteer and service hours that she has done. Hearing them give me these answers over and over again breaks my heart. I see their desire to please Jesus, but they are missing the most beautiful, amazing, and freeing parts of the gospel! These girls are all missing GRACE! They feel as if they have to live up to some "Christian standard", be a good person,  follow God perfectly etc. in order to stay at that 100%.

As I've been talking with them, and explaining to them the beauty of grace, that we can never get to God on our own, all of our good deeds will never be enough BUT God is gracious and loving and came down to save us. Jesus died on the cross for our sins as a free gift so that we could be forgiven and have a relationship with God. My heart desperately wanted them to understand and feel the freedom of knowing our position in Christian.

Later after one of my meetings I realized that maybe God was using all of these encounters with these girls as a reminder for my own heart. I know all of these truths, but how often do I slip back into the rut of perfectionism and trying to earn my favor with God. He wanted to remind me that these truths are not just for these girls that I am talking to, but that they apply to me as well. That yes, maybe I have failed or slipped up in some ways lately, but that does not affect my identity in Christ, or the fact that God loves me unconditionally and I am his beloved daughter. Instead God wanted to use these girls to remind me to look up and find my perfection in Christ and not myself and rest in his work instead of striving in vain on my own.

Just like my heart hurts to see these girls not understand grace, God's heart hurts when I don't live in the freedom of that grace. Now that I know and have experienced true freedom, why would I ever want to go back to the weary days of perfectionism? Lord help me believe that my perfection is found in you alone and that your grace is there to cover all of my failures, that no matter how many times I fall and mess up you are right there to pick me back up again and remind me of who I am in YOU!

"But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ— by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast." -Eph 2:4-9

How God Changed my heart

Last night I had the awesome opportunity of being able to share a small part of my story at our campus ministry's meeting. I promised I share it with some of my friends who weren't able to make it so here it is! So grateful for all that God has done in my life. 

I grew up like any other church kid who was raised in a Christian home. I heard all the Bible stories in Sunday school, learned all about God and knew all the right answers in youth group. I knew how to talk the talk and I even knew how to live out the Christian life, how to serve others and memorize scripture. Yet everything I did was lifeless and shallow. Something was missing in all of my good Christian stuff. I felt empty and hallow.

My knowledge fooled me and those around me. I collected knowledge about God like one collects books on a shelf or memorizes history facts. Because of this there was no life or joy in my walk with God. I was following all of the rules, it had become about behavior modification to me and learning how to be good. Somehow in the midst of Sunday school lessons, youth groups and sermons I neglected and missed the most important part of being a Christian: having a personal relationship with God!

But thankfully God didn’t leave me there, at Cru’s winter conference- INDYCC God used the testimony of a friend and one of my leaders, to show me how deeply Jesus loved me and how he desired to intimately know me and infuse life into my relationship with him!

At the moment God opened my heart and showed me that although I had known all about God and even did things to serve God, I didn't actually truly know God. That night God was gracious enough to show me what was missing in my life and that was him! I was missing a personal, powerful connection and relationship with Jesus Christ! Ever since then my life as a Christian has been completely different. There is now so much joy and grace that motivates what I do.

        Some things may still look the same on the outside like reading my Bible, but the motivation behind it is how different, for example I now study God’s word not to simply gain knowledge, but to know him. I spend time with him and talk to him because I love him and I want to grow closer to God and know more of who he is instead of only praying when I need things from him! Before I simply knew about Jesus, but now I truly know Jesus like a friend and having that real personal relationship with Jesus is what has changed everything for me; and brought joy, life, and grace into my walk with God!

Life is like a puzzle!

Anyone who does large puzzles knows that you always want to start with the border first. You dig through the box and find all the edges and then quickly put together all the pieces to make the border of the puzzle. This part is always my favorite part, because I get to make the framework for the puzzle and it's also the easiest part to, there are only so many edges and so it's easier to put them together and find the right matches and it goes by a lot quicker then to rest of the puzzle. 

I think life is a lot like that. We love the exciting parts of life the parts that seem productive and fruitful or adventurous or new, like starting a new job, traveling or seeing a ministry blossom. But then we dread and don't appreciate the harder, more mundane parts, the parts where there are a million yellow puzzle pieces that all seem the same, where we have to seek joy even in the midst of the mundane tasks of life like writing papers, studying, and working. The parts of life that seem painful and cruel the pieces that frustrate us so much that we'd rather leave them in the box. But it's in these hard times where we see the most growth. The times where relationships are in shambles, where there is hurt, where circumstances seem to overwhelm us 

 You see a puzzle would look pretty silly if you simply left it with just the frame together and a few random pieces inside it would be empty and would be a broken picture, it wouldn't be able to display it's full beauty and purpose.

That's much like us, without the hard parts of life to refine us, change us and help us to grow we would be like an incomplete picture, we would be lacking the character, wisdom, faith, love and Christ-likeness that is only born through adversity, fighting temptation and learning to trust God. Those times when you're forced to completely rely on God because you are at your wits ends and he's the only one who has power over the situation or you who really truly understands the depths of your pain! Yes it's in these seasons and times where God is gently placing more of the challenging pieces of the puzzle into our lives and oh just wait and see when he is finished what a glorious, beautiful masterpiece it will be! 

So yes, sometimes I'm impatient, and want to rush past the boring parts of life or sometimes I seek comfort and ease and want to fly over the valleys of darkness instead of trudge through the middle of them. But oh it is so worth it to persevere, to blossom and grow and not stay stagnant and I for one do not want to rush the beautiful picture that God is putting together in my life piece by piece! 

My friend be encouraged God is doing wonderful things in your life and heart and making something beautiful out of all the chaos, mess and pain! And for now while the picture is still in progress and still incomplete simply take that step to trust him and rest in his promises and faithfulness! He has never left us and he won't start now!

Stars

The promises of God 

are as sure as the stars 

they are constant and true

faithful like the dawn

Yet we are quick to doubt 

and prone to forget

when the storms and winds come 

we wonder if God is really there

But just as the stars shine brightest 

on the darkest nights 

God's promises ring loud and true

even through the storms

Some nights are so full of clouds 

that you may not see the stars

but even when the clouds cover them

you know the stars are still there

They are simply hiding behind the clouds 

waiting for the storm to pass 

and when it does they will emerge

and shine even more brightly

reminding you that they are still there 

and haven't changed

This is the same with God's promises

they may be hidden by the storms of life

 but they are true and real

and he is faithful and unchanging 

So even when it's hard to see 

and hard to feel God's hand 

remember to not be blinded by the storm

that's right in front of you 

but instead look past it and see the stars  

and feel his arms wrap around you as he whispers 

Do not fear, for I will never leave you

or forsake you