Fear

Why do we let fear control our lives so much? I honestly do not know the answer to that question.

When something undesirable happens in life, we become fearful of it. Why is that? It may take days or even years to overcome that fear. (Even if it’s stupid) And, when you finally do overcome it, why do other things happen that bring that fear back to your mind? Just something I want to know. It’s like a continuous cycle that just so happens to be incredibly hard to break free of.

(I know that might not make sense, so here’s an example)

There you are as a 10 year old kid. You see your friend get their fingers rolled up in a car window. From then on, you will not even roll down a car window. It takes you until you are 16 years old to finally be comfortable with rolling a window in the car. Just when you get over that fear, you stick your arm out the window, and some freak accident happens, and you get rolled up in the car window. The fear returns, and the cycle starts all over again.

(Stupid example, but maybe it makes some sense)

Need for Involvement

At 16 (edging closer to 17) years old, I am realizing how much of a longing that I have to be involved in things. I absolutely despise missing out on pretty much anything. If an opportunity is on my doorstep (even if it means squeezing it between two other things) it will probably make it onto my schedule. With school just starting and everything, I have found a free day. That free day is Monday. Nobody is taking my Monday. I love my Monday! So, just in case you were wondering if I could do something with/for you on Monday, I can’t. Monday is mine. Of course, I do get a random Friday or Saturday here or there, but Monday is always free. Nobody wants to do anything on Mondays. I have no play practice, no science team, nothing else. Actually, I take that back. I go to the barn on Mondays. But, that is still “me time.” I’m hoping that as the next few weeks and months of school cruise on by, I will find more me time. I am loving the play that we’re working on in drama, but I honestly wish that we didn’t have after school practices. It would give me more barn/me time. I just have to hang on tight until Thanksgiving…then I’m home free. But…that’s three months away.

Now that I have completely and totally bored you all with my speech on “Me Mondays” I will close out this post with absolutely no thought provoking statement or recap of my day. Thank you for your time.

La Escuela

I think that I am finally getting used to being back in school. A quick update on the classes:

SAT Prep- Boring as anything, but I’m hoping it will help my SAT scores get up to where I want them

Spanish 2- Ummm…we might be starting a Spanish Club…that could be fun!

Drama- Working on the dessert theater, and it is going to be awesome

Bible- It’s going to be a good year. Awesome new teacher. We’re going through Proverbs for the whole year! That makes me happy!

Chemistry- This is fun, and I think I will manage to do pretty well in this class.

Clubs and Other Activities

Science Team- Beginning shortly. Kaitlyn and I will be building the electric vehicle again

Drama- As posted above…dessert theater. Practices on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school

Beta Club- No meetings quite yet

Y-Club- First officers meeting tomorrow. Madi= something along the lines of “Community Events/Involvement Coordinator”

Spanish Club- TBA

License to Drive

I know I went on and on in a post about the dessert theater yesterday, but I didn’t even mention that I am officially a licensed driver. Scary, I know. I was nervous to the extreme, and I honestly thought that I was going to fail horribly. I knocked down four cones while attempting to back into a parking space. It was pretty funny. The lady in the car said, “You hit the cones.” I was sitting there thinking “Thank you, Captain Obvious. This is something that I have realized.” But of course, you don’t talk to people like that. I was a little shaken over that, so when I went up to the stop sign to make a right turn, I accidentally switched gears instead of hitting the blinker. I kind of thought that the lady was going to laugh at me. She was very nice though. I did manage to parallel park, which was what I was so worried about. It wasn’t perfect, but I got into the spot.

My true driving test comes early Sunday morning when I drive to FreedomChurch all by my lonely self. I did manage to drive myself home yesterday without getting all panicked or anything, so I should be fine.

Touched by an “Angle”

Nope, I didn’t misspell “angel.” This years fall play (it’s a dessert theater) at school is called “Touched by an Angle.” It’s going to be a very cute comedy. I am playing the part of a member of the girls football team at Slumber High. Did I mention that the “football team” has a song and dance number? In case any of you haven’t noticed, I am not very talented in either of those areas. We began choreographing our dance today, and I’m picking it up pretty quickly. It’s actually fun. I’ll just have to see how much fun I think it is in front of a couple hundred people. : ) I desperately need prayer.

Confessions of a Teenage People-Pleaser

Yes, people-pleasing seems to be a rather large problem of mine. I will do almost anything (within reason, that does not compromise my beliefs or morals) for pretty much anybody. I recently realized that my eager-to-please personality has been extremely detrimental to me in the past, as well as in the present. It has sometimes caused me to put some very important things in my life “on the back-burner” so to speak. I get so consumed with making sure that everybody around me is happy. That is good sometimes, but bad a whole bunch of the time. I don’t want to say that I am easy to take advantage of, but in all reality, I am. I actually got to the point where I was compromising my time with God to have enough time to keep people happy. No more!

Right now, at this very moment in time, I am resolving to say “no” when I know that what I am being asked to do will be way too much pressure on me. I would like to thank my friends at FreedomChurch for helping me to learn that I don’t have to do it all. If anyone there asks me to do something, they always say, “You don’t have to do it if you are in the middle of something else, or if you don’t think you want to.” Wow! I was thinking about it one day, and I thought to myself, “There is actually an answer other than, ‘Sure, of course, that’s no problem. I would love to.’” Although, if someone asks me to do something there, it’s always something I want to do. There won’t be many “No’s” going on there. Most of my problem is at school, or with friends outside of school. The questions that get me are:

“I really don’t have time, would you mind taking care of that for me?”

“Please, please, please? That would make my day!”

“If you could…that would help me out so much.”

Yep, that’s it. All of those questions lead to making someone happy. It’s like you don’t even realize what you’re doing until the stress of it all starts to take a toll on you. My advice to every person in the world is: Don’t worry about keeping everything in every person’s life in place. Just concentrate on what God wants from you first, then, if you can, go above and beyond for others. Don’t run yourself into the ground. It’s not a good road to go down because it’s hard to turn around.

Flip-Flops and Flashbacks

Well, let me just say that FreedomKidz was absolutely phenomenal today! I believe that it went very well with it being the first Sunday with the live worship and interactive curriculum. It is much better than what we had in the past. Not to mention, I immensely enjoyed being Agent X and dancing to the really great spy song with all those kids.

The message was equally as phenomenal. I enjoyed it very much. I can never hear a message about “taking irreversible steps” too much. It’s something that I constantly need to be reminded of. The flip flop that I got will be a great reminder because I have pinned it to my bulletin board. It’s pretty great. I will amuse you all with a picture of that.

I am also posting a picture of a little flashback into the past. I was going through pictures, and I came across one of me, on almost this exact date four years ago…after a youth group event. It was a water fight, which would explain the wet hair. I guess you can tell it’s me. The shirt that I’m wearing is not the one that I wear these days. It was actually my favorite shirt in seventh grade, and I completely and totally wore it out. Mom made me get rid of it at the end of middle school. Somehow, when I went to KY this summer, I ended up coming home with an identical shirt. Funny how that works. I guess I loved the color because I was immediately drawn to it both times I went into that gift shop. : )

The green flip-flop…

Madi in 2004 with not the same shirt…haha

The Drama of the Morning

Well, I woke up this morning and did what most any kid these days would do as soon as they wake up. I answered text messages and checked Facebook. I thought that the house was strangely quiet this morning. I heard only one set of footsteps. I knew it was Dad. So, I started to leave my room, and I heard him go out the door and lock it. I then remembered that Mom had taken Mitchell to soccer tryouts for the school around 8:30. I also remembered that Dad was at the garage down the street showing a car that is for sale to some guy. I fixed myself a bowl of Life, and opened the front door to let the cat in. Suddenly, the house alarm goes off. I just thought, “No big deal, I’ve done this before. They will call and ask for the cancellation code, and all will be well.” The phone never rang. I just dismissed it. Then Dad called and asked if I had set the alarm off because my aunt called him about a phone call that she got saying that they were going to dispatch the police. At this point, I am thinking, “Great, they’re going to come to the house and I am going to have to talk to them about all of this.” I didn’t have the phone number for the alarm company so that I could call and cancel.

During all of this, Mrs.Pickens called and told be that she talked to my English teacher about my summer reading projects that I turned in a day late. (I had a very good excuse, and turning those things in on the first day was the last thing on my mind. I don’t even have English this semester) I apparently can get 50% of what my grade would have been. That grade is a test grade. (2 test grades, I think) Hearing that just kind of made everything seem worse than it actually was.

Dad ended up calling with the phone number that I needed. So, I called, gave them the code, and they said that they could “attempt to cancel.” So, for the past 40 minutes or so, I have been sitting here on the couch hoping that nobody shows up at the front door. I would probably cry. True story…

Give Blood: Make Snow Cones

Those things are dangerous. I was pretty excited when Dawn told me that today was going to be a fun day in FreedomKidz. We had all kinds of games and fun music, plus snow cones. What kid could ask for more. I worked the first service, and all was well. Then, something happened with the volunteer numbers for second service, and I agreed to work again. I had been working the snow cone machine just fine until it got clogged. I had read in the instructions that sometimes ice builds up in there, and you have to poke it out. Apparently I poked from the wrong side, and I sliced the top of my middle finger open on the ice-crushing blades inside of the machine. I pulled my finger out, and it began to bleed profusely. I kind of “up and left” without telling Dawn anything because I was having to cup my hands to hold all that blood that was pouring out of my finger. TMI, I know. I dashed to the nearest restroom, rinsed off my hands, and put pressure on my finger with a wet paper towel. Pressure, of course, stopped the bleeding. I wandered over to the new “volunteer lounge” to see if I could get a little help. The people that were in there are my new favorite people. The whole situation was just comical. I was standing there bleeding to death, Eric and Callie were telling me stories about people who had babies and didn’t even know they were pregnant, and Ms.Teri and Joni were digging through the first aid box. I bled through gauze withing one minute, so we went with the heavy duty waterproof band-aids. Whoever invented those things is genius. I had to go back to elementary after leaving Dawn in there for quite a while without an explanation, and tell my story. I’m just praying that no kid got any nasty stuff in their snow cone. That would be icky. Well, you have just read a detailed account of my action-packed morning. I am thankful that God blessed me with a high tolerance for pain. haha.

Everything…

…Has been extremely odd for the past 24 hours. After people left our house last night, the power went out and stayed out for 2 hours. So basically, nobody showered until this morning because showering in the dark is tough. By the time we were all drifting off to sleep, all of the lights came back on, and the alarm started going off. We eventually all got to sleep, and I had another one of my absolutely bizarre dreams. I dreamed about frozen seafood, FreedomChurch, and a giant bunny costume that came alive and chased me everywhere. So weird, I know. This morning was hectic because everyone wanted the bathroom because nobody got it last night. So, there were 6 of us scrambling to get ready to go do stuff before 2:30 today. We came home at about 3, and I loaded up Sweet Tea and took off for downtown Acworth to meet Dad because he was stuck in traffic on 75 and couldn’t pick me up. (By the way, I’m getting my license at the beginning of next week.) Yay Madi! Ummm, got to Acworth at 4, and helped set up stuff and blow up balloons. It was an awesome night. The music was great, and I enjoyed talking with Teresa and Callie tonight. They are so incredibly funny. I had dinner at Cotton’s with PaPa and Gram. I also watched kids do dangerous things on inflatables. It was great. Anyway, it was just hectic around here, and school starts in 6 days, so it’s about to get even crazier. The only thing that I’m really looking forward to during the school year is the launch of FreedomGeneration, and the school’s fall dessert theater that I will be taking part in. Other than that, I wish summer lasted a whole lot longer. : )