Lesson(s) Learned

For some of you in my life, you've been asking, praying, and waiting to see something noteworthy happening in my dating life. So have I. Because I don't exactly know where to start, I'll simply begin at the beginning. Jeff and I both went to school together at Trinity Christian Academy here in Jacksonville from kindergarten to twelfth grade. From first grade to sixth grade, we had all the same teachers. Because our last names are so similar alphabetically (Hazard and Hill), we were seemingly ALWAYS sitting next to each other. Seriously. Always. Around. Each. Other. haha… For those of you that know me well or have known me for a long time, you know that God's done quite the work in my life over the years in chipping away some (note: not all) of my childhood sassiness and giving me a sweet spirit in its place. However, for those of you that knew me then, you would readily agree that I was quite the "over-confident little girl" (to quote my daddy). ...

Lately, I've been going through a personal Bible study by Kelly Minter entitled "Nehemiah: A Heart That Can Break," and I have recently (within the last couple of days or so) asked that God would specifically break my heart for something that breaks His. Naturally, we all have those areas that touch a soft spot in our hearts, but this prayer I've been praying asked God to specifically break my heart for something or some area that I had not yet considered. In other words, I've been asking God to extend the borders of my scope of compassion. At the end of the day, I truly want my life and my compassion for others to mirror that of the heart of God for the world in its entirety. I'm not there yet. Not. even. close. Today, God very vividly answered my prayer for a broken heart for something that breaks His heart. But, as you can probably imagine, it came in a much different packaging than I originally anticipated (which, in itself, is a testament to...

Scars, Marks, and Understanding the Difference between the Two Every morning, I get an email-devotion sent straight to Gmail. Some mornings I get up, read it, and kind of forget about it. Some days, I don’t get to read it until the afternoon or nighttime. But this morning, however, I woke up to the sound of my devotion-email being delivered to my phone, which happened to arrive to my inbox before 7a.m. Bless them. All jokes aside, I’m sort of glad that I woke up to this devotion-email this morning because I’m pretty sure it’s exactly what I needed to read. (and maybe what some of you need to read also, so I’m going to do what I’ve been teaching my precious twin-toddler-nephews to do: I’m going to “share, share, share, share, share!”) And here goes… My devotion-in-an-email this morning centered around Job13:23b, 27, “Show me my offense and my sin… You keep a close watch on all my paths by putting marks on the soles of my feet .” Ok. There it is. So, I’m unsure ...

I’m not really a fan of country music, unless Taylor Swift counts (I’m pretty sure she doesn’t). With Taylor Swift included or not, I do, oddly enough, know my fair share of “country” music lyrics. One song that has always kind of stuck with me is the one that says, “I thank God for unanswered prayers.” (See, I don’t even know who sings it or what the name of the song is… this just goes to show that I’m so-not-a-country-music-fan.) I don’t know about you, but I don’t thank God for ‘unanswered’ prayers. Know why? They simply don’t exist. For a long time, I kind of thought and felt like they did. I’ve literally spent entire seasons of my life before praying and crying to God about situations in my life that I wished turned out differently than they did. Even if unanswered prayers did somehow exist, I don’t think I’d thank God for them. I think I’d struggle with them. I’d obsess over them. I’d make them a constant concern on my heart/mind. I’d lose sight of G...

The Beauty of Supervision Today, I had a rush of childhood memories flood back into my mind as I sat in my fourth-grade classroom amidst a group of seven students. We had a group project to undertake in History today, and the curriculum only accounted for 6 students to be in a group. In a class with 7 students, I knew that a curriculum plan for 6 would be a no-go. You simply can’t assign everyone a “job” or a “responsibility” in the group and just let one person off scot-free. So, what did I do? I had no other choice but to create a position. The name of the position? “Group Supervisor” Here’s the description that I made up to go with it: “The Group Supervisor holds the clipboard and the ‘Miss Hill’ signature stamp. Every time the group completes a step of the project correctly, the group supervisor will stamp the checklist and tell the group to keep going.” Pretty lame idea, right? I thought no one would’ve went for it. I couldn’t have been more wrong...

The strangest thing happened in my classroom today. Granted, it was Valentine’s Day. Mustaches and mustache jokes were running rampant. If I had a nickel for every time I heard, “I mustache ask you to be mine” followed by a classroom full of giggles, I’d be a pretty rich teacher today. It never got old. Seriously, it was funny every time it was said. I’m dearly-so-thankful that my kiddos have such an overall FUN sense of humor. I don’t know what I’d do if they didn’t. Aside from all of the excitement of our sugar-filled day, the strangest thing happened in my classroom. For Math lesson today, the kids were given multiplication and division facts all jumbled up. After they figured out the missing numbers, they were supposed to match up the multiplication and corresponding division problems and label them as a “multiplication match.” (Yes, it was complete with hearts – just to give it a Valentine-y edge. :) ) For this activity, I put them into partner-groups, so the...

Sometimes, I like to make "deals" with God. Don't look at me that way... you know you've done it too. At the very least, you've thought about it. The deals I'm talking about look and sound something like this... "God, if You ______________, then I'll _______________." Oftentimes, in my own life, these kinds of prayer-deals with God flow from a result of uncertainty and a pure desire to have a "clear sign" from God on which way to go, what decision to make, what to do next, the timescale of when I should act on something, etc. However, sometimes, these kinds of prayer-deals that I make with God are a result of impatience or a lack of trust on my part. If God gave us all the "clear signs" we asked for, we'd start worshipping the signs and not the One whose very signature is written all over our entire beings. As a common worship song reminds us, "from life's first cry to final breath, Jesus commands my destiny....