An Update on My Caterpillar Rash

If you guys read one of my previous posts, you would know I had a caterpillar attack and now have a rash all over my body except for my legs.

Not fun, I tell you. Not fun.

Well, it hasn't really gotten better, so I went to the doctor yesterday (my daddy took me) and she gave me a cream and some pills and a tips as to how to get rid of most of the itchiness. Well, guess what it is!

BAKING POWDER! 

...so baking powder is my new best friend now! Yay! I mean, I also have a cream that works even better, but that's only for the most irritated areas where I sweat the most (neck, stomach).

So yeah. I hope that my rash will have died down by Monday so I don't have to go to school looking like some crazy teenager that scratches herself for no reason (that's seriously almost what it looks like). And I don't want my teachers thinking I'm crazy or something.

Which I'm not.

Seriously.

An Update on My Thursday Devotion

If you read my post from a few days ago, you'll know that I was planning a devotion for my class. However, yesterday I was thinking about how my classmates would be totally bored out if I just talked the whole time, so I went on Youtube, asking God to help me find something to make my devotion more interesting. About three minutes later, I found this!

I was so amazed! After watching the video, I was like, God, you really ARE amazing!. He literally gave me this video to show to my class - that's how amazing He is! So, I shortened my devotional speech and downloaded this video to show to my class. This is my shortened devotion (the red parts are the things I added to make it relate to the video):

(after showing the video)

This girl Emily Griffin started off her life thinking that it didn’t matter what she did, God would still forgive her in the end and she’d still end up in heaven if she repented. A lot of our secret philosophies on life are “live a party now, ask God for forgiveness later, and then go to heaven”. But that’s not what God has planned for our lives.

The book Chasing Daylight says:

You were born to live a great adventure; You were created with a divine destiny; You are called to fulfill a great mission. You were designed for unique purpose. Now you are called to live it out.

This is kinda like what our speaker last week told us: life is an epic journey, right? What this book talks about is that God is so often misunderstood when people know Him for judgment and rules. Actually, Jesus calls us to a life of unimaginable adventure. And it begins the moment we choose to follow Him. Because when we do, we pass from a mere existence to real, true life (walking in the truth). His promise is that in Him we will find the life that our hearts have always longed for.

There is no principle that says everyone who does God’s will lives and easy life – at least not on this earth. Even when we live, it doesn’t mean the victory comes without suffering.

If we are going to seize divine moments, we much accept the reality that we have no control over many so many things. We have no control over when we die or how we die. We must take responsibility now over what we do have control over – how we choose to live.

Emily told us that she had troubles and that it was difficult to get over her obsession with drinking even as she was trying to fill her life with Jesus. To follow Jesus is to enter the unknown, to relinquish security, and to exchange certainty for complete confidence in Him.

Are you willing to live a life that honors God and reflects His character and leave the outcome to Him? Are you willing to live by faith and trust him to be faithful? There will be days on this journey of faith when the crystal clear outcome will be something you don’t like. On those days you must, like Jesus, declare, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but your will be done”.

I know that sometimes the current outcome may seem sucky, but God promises that with Him, lives that are lived built on full pursuit of Him and His plan won’t every be regretted no matter how difficult it was to live that life. This is because these sort of lives are at their best – and there’s nothing more that we could possibly ask for.

Even though a lot of you guys right now are trying to block out what I just said, I really encourage you today to make a choice. Everyone (even the people who pretend to not care) has some sort of desire or want to live a full life with purpose. Everyone. So what I encourage you to do today is to ignore your impulse to impress others by pretending you have it all together. You don’t. The truth is, you don’t. God is the only person who can control whether you go to heaven or not. What you can control is how your life ends up, and what you leave behind. What you can control is whether or not you want to die a content, happy person that leaves behind a mark that says ‘I lived life to its fullest’. And I know you all want that.

Here’s a verse that God suddenly brought to my attention yesterday: Romans 14:7-8

For none of us lives to himself alone and none of us dies to himself alone. If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.

This verse you see at the end is another great "God showed me story". I was looking at my favorite verse in the Bible in Romans (which I will probably talk about in some other post sometime soon) when I suddenly looked at this verse and went, Wow!!! God, again?! And this was after the video experience. Cheesy as this "story" may sound about God showing me what to use for my devotion, I really believe it was Him, because I couldn't have done this without Him! God is GOOD!

Caterpillars and Rashes

Today in History class I unexpectedly got super itchy all over my body except for my legs. It was horrible! I asked my teacher if I could go to the school nurse and he said that I should wait a few minutes (he thought it may be allergies and that if I didn’t have trouble breathing I was going to be okay). The trouble is, I’m not allergic to anything, and I doubt I ever will be! After about five minutes, the itchiness all over my body was gradually getting worse and I thought I would literally scratch all of my skin off my body, I was so itchy. So I desperately asked my teacher again if I could PLEASE go to the nurse (I was near tears), and he still didn’t think it was worth missing the class. I quote, “What would the nurse do to help you? Do you honestly think this is worth missing the lesson for?” Of course, I didn’t really know how to respond to this, so I just tried to keep quiet. Five minutes AFTER THAT, I was practically crying as I asked my teacher if I could at least go get a wet towel to dab on the rapidly spreading rash that covered my arms, neck, and parts of my face. I could feel the rash spreading over my stomach and back, but I knew it would look weird if I scratched there.

Well anyway, my teacher said yes, and so I go up to go the bathroom. All of a sudden, my friend that was sitting near to me called out, “Oh my gosh, Sarah! I know why you’ve been so itchy! You have a bug on your back.” Of course, an image entered my mind of a huge, gruesome, ugly thing crawling all over me, and I started squealing, begging another friend sitting nearby to “get it off me!”. Well, she flicked it off, and I saw this tiny black caterpillar on the floor with a white streak through it. All my friends nearby were totally creeped out and I was also practically in tears. I rushed out of the room and to the bathroom, where I stripped off my shirt, shook it out, and started dabbing at my rashes with wet tissues. I was so horrified!

About a minute later I went back to class and made it through the rest of the lesson pretty calmly, although I was still itching like CRAZY. The wet cloths were helping a little bit, but I still had huge urges to just rip my skin off my body. After history class, we had one more period of the day, but I didn’t think I would be able to handle it without taking a shower first. So I ran to the bathrooms again and took a nice, amazing shower (thank goodness I had extra clothes from PE!). After the shower, I was still itching, but I felt somewhat clean and a little bit more calm about the current circumstances. Nevertheless, I went to the school nurse (who was glad that I came because it could have gotten really serious), and she put this cream all over me that made me just go, ‘Aaaaah’. It was heaven. After that, I went back to math class smelling like medicine but feeling a WHOLE lot better! Thank GOD for school nurses! :)

Now I’m back home and I’m still itching in some places and I have tons of dots and rashes all over my body. But I feel so much better and I’m glad that this experience is all over and done with! I’ve lived here in Cambodia my whole life and I’ve never gone through this before – it was a nightmare!

"Walking in the Truth" - Living Life with a Purpose

This Thursday I am leading devotions in my homeroom class, and I decided to share with you what I've decided to speak about. These are my exact notes for this Thursday morning:

In my Sunday school class we’ve been doing these really cool sessions called “Chasing Daylight”. Basically what they are about is “seizing the power of every moment” and “choosing to live by making the right choices with impact”. Cheesy and out-of-this-world as this may sound, I think what I’ve learned so far has really helped me. It also sort of matches what we spoke about in FLAG week last week. We spoke about “walking in the truth” with God, right? Well, today I decided to share what walking in the truth means to me.

To me, walking in the truth is a basic translation of living life with a real purpose. The only problem with our society today is that we try to avoid the pain of fear and doubt by “just getting by”. A lot of our secret philosophies on life are “live a party now, ask God for forgiveness later, and then go to heaven”. But that’s not what God has planned for our lives.

The book Chasing Daylight says:

You were born to live a great adventure; You were created with a divine destiny; You are called to fulfill a great mission. You were designed for unique purpose. Now you are called to live it out.

This is kinda like what our speaker last week told us: life is an epic journey, right? What this book talks about is that God is so often misunderstood when people know Him for judgment and rules. Actually, Jesus calls us to a life of unimaginable adventure. And it begins the moment we choose to follow Him. Because when we do, we pass from a mere existence to real, true life of walking in the truth. His promise is that in Him we will find the life that our hearts have always longed for.

The most spiritual activity you engage in everyday is making choices. When you think about the story of Adam and Eve, they had a Garden full of endless opportunities for pleasure. And yet, they chose another path, one that severed their relationship with God forever. Like with them, the choices we make either bring us closer to God or move us away from Him.   

One encouraging thing I noticed about this story was that, when Adam was hiding after his sin, God set out in search of him. Even when we get lost, God and His mercy still pursue us and invite us to once again join His divine adventure.

Now I ask you: Have you confused the blessing of God with wealth, comfort and security? There are things that God does for you and then there are things that He’s waiting for you to do. The journey begins when you choose to “stop wasting daylight” and start to live in the epicenter of God’s activity.

There is no principle that says everyone who does God’s will lives – at least not on this earth. Even when we live, it doesn’t mean the victory comes without suffering.

Here's something else from Chasing Daylight:

If we are going to seize divine moments, we must accept the reality that we have no control over many things. We have no control over when we die or how we die. We must take responsibility over what we do have control over – how we choose to live.

Jesus said, “If you have the faith of a mustard seed, you can move mountains.” He didn’t say that we should all have a tiny bit of faith. He’s saying that it takes very little faith to accomplish great things.

To follow Jesus is to enter the unknown, and to push away security and certainty for full confidence in Him.

Are you willing to live a life that honors God and reflects His character and leave the outcome to Him? There will be days on this journey of faith when the crystal clear outcome will be something you don’t like. On those days you must, like Jesus, declare, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; and may not my will, but yours be done. Amen”.

Okaaaay. So that's my devotion. I realize that I have a few random, non related thoughts thrown in here and there, but that's what was on my mind at the time, and I think it's important for my classmates to know this stuff. 

Please pray for me as I give this devotional - I'm really praying that God will use me to speak some change into my friends' lives. Also, I pray that God will help me not to be nervous and that I can take on this "challenge" with full certainty of what He has planned and how He wants the devotional to go.

Amen!

Long-Distance Skyping with a Long-Time Friend

Yesterday (Sunday) I finally got a chance to Skype again with my "long-lost" best friend, Hannah Richter. Exactly 9,244.2 miles (14,877.1 kilometers) apart, we video chatted for two and a half hours, talking about things like One Direction and the newest movies coming out to our joys and fears about school. We would probably have kept Skyping if I hadn't had to go to church. This Skype sesh was a usual one for us (7:00am my time, 7:00pm her time), but we hadn't had the chance to do it in two whole weeks, and we had loads to talk about.

Here are some awesome photos we took of ourselves:

Hannah's been my best friend since Kindergarten. But now she's gone for good. She went back the States over the summer, thinking she'd be back in January. But she's not coming back. And that totally stinks.

I don't know why I'm telling you this on my blog, but I guess it's because this "event" (the "Hannah leaving" event, not necessarily the "Skyping with her" event) has truly shaped who I am now, and it's definitely going to shape me in the future. The fact that Hannah is staying in the US for good was a totally devastating blow for me when she told me via Skype in the summer, but I guess that I can't change the way things are right now. 

Hannah is in America for a reason, you know. I'm pretty sure her whole family wanted to stay here in Cambodia. But I guess they're dealing with some tough family issues right now, and I'm positive that it's what God has planned for their lives, no matter how difficult the circumstances may seem.

I'm sitting here sitting my decaf coffee (because yes, it is the best drink on planet earth), and I miss my best friend. So bad. But do you know what? That's okay. It's okay to miss her. Because I have a feeling that this huge distance between us physically is starting to shape our friendship emotionally and spiritually. And that totally rocks!

A Pencil Drawing of My Sister

You probably don't know yet that I am taking IGCSE Art in my school this year. Since this blog is all about me being real and not being shy, I've decided to take a huge step and show a piece of work I did for homework last week. It's not my best, and since it's still only the beginning of school and I'm not so used to drawing so often yet, you'll have to excuse me if it doesn't look that amazing. But hey, this is me!

I took pictures of my progress over the few hours I took to do this. My first picture is of the slightly-more-than-basic outline of the drawing, done with a 2B pencil. You can even still see the guidelines I used! I didn't draw on the glasses because I had to get the eyes right first. I did this by imagining what she would look like in the photo without the glasses on. 
The biggest challenge, though, was the mouth. I've never really drawn anyone with teeth before, so I basically just did the best I could. I drew the shape outline of the mouth, and then drew in the lips. After that I drew the outline of the teeth. This is the just the outline stage, so I didn't start on the details of the teeth and lips.

This next step, I added the glasses (which is more difficult than it looks!). 

In this next step, I added some more shading. I tried to make the hair more accurate and I started shading in the headband and the glasses and the neck. All this shading I still did with my 2B pencil in case I made a mistake.    

Finally I started shading with a 6B! I finished off the glasses, the eyes, the headband, and the ear.

 In this next picture, I shaded in the hair and some parts of the face. The first layer of shading I did with my 2B (I am very afraid of mistakes!), and then deepened the darkest parts of the hair with my 6B pencil.
 

Finally I got to shading the shoulders, neck, and backpack strap. Once again, I did this with a 2B and then layered over some 6B pencil shading. I tried to get the depth of the individual folds of the shirt, and that was quite difficult.

At last, I added the last few finishing touches to my drawing. I fixed up most of the shading and finished my teeth. I was surprised at how difficult that was! All this I did with my 6B because I was running out of time and I would have needed the 6B pencil anyway. 

And that was it! I had finished my drawing. Yay! My art teacher noticed a few things as we was evaluating my work the next day in class:

1.  The face was a bit shorter and fatter than in the picture. My art teacher gave me advice and told me that I should stand up and compare the pictures from a distance in the first five to ten minutes of the drawing to compare the outline and shape of the faces. He didn't make me fix this because it would have ruined all that time spent on homework.
2. I didn't add the background. My art teacher suggested I use "artistic license" to not make the darkest parts of the background as dark as they are in the photo. This is to bring out the depth of the shading of the face. He still suggested that I should add the background, though, but with a 2B pencil in order to keep it as soft as possible.
3. The folds of the shirt are not as clear and defined as in the picture. I need to go over the shirt and fix the mistakes to add depth to each individual fold as it is in the picture.

Well yeah, it was okay. It's not the best piece of work I've done, but it was definitely good practice to get myself into the school year habits of how to draw well and how to draw portraits and all. It also helped me to develop technique on drawing teeth and  a smile, as well as drawing glasses.

All I can say now is: my sister was much more difficult to draw than I though she was going to be! :)

God: No Mask Needed

There are a lot of things I could say about my life that wouldn't interest a person in the world. That's why I think that God is so amazing. He cares about me - every single part of me and my life. Isn't that an awesome thought? Humans on earth can disappoint you so easily, and yet, God never disappoints. He's everything we need and everything we could possibly want. 

That's what I've been thinking about lately. So many people I know have these masks up, hiding themselves from the world because they're afraid of rejection. But God is the one "person" who knows the deepest parts of everyone. Even though that may be a creepy though for many people, I think it's refreshing. It's nice to know that I don't have to put on a mask for God, because He knows who I am and He knows my every thought.

Here's a snippet from a book I've been reading called Set Apart Femininity: 

It's a lot easier to build our lives around the pursuit of worldly applause and selfish pleasure and just fit Christ in somewhere on the side than to radically pour out our lives in sacrificial devotion to Him.
But the reason that we as modern young Christian women are so insecure, lonely, and unfulfilled is because we are pursuing shallow beauty, hollow approval of the world, and selfish pleasures, all the while proclaiming to be representatives of Christ.

This is so true! I believe that our lives should reflect the stunning beauty of Jesus Christ instead of the shallow pursuit of "fitting in" in a pop-culture infested world. It's nice to have God around to talk to when you're putting on a mask for the world. But what is the point of being real with God when you won't be real with the world? I believe that God wants us to not only run to Him, but He also wants us to show the world how amazing and awesome He is. That's the soul purpose of being His daughter - to radiate His stunning beauty in order to show the world what an awesome God He really is.