WHEN SHOULD DREAMS DIE?

I watched a movie today.  In the opening the lady looses her job and get a less than inspiring speach from her mother about her "dreams".   

"When you are 8 and you've got dreams, that's adorable, when you're 18 that's inspiring, but when you're 28, that's just embarrassing...... *pity face* let's just not get to heartbreaking"

My question though is this:  When should a dream die?  I think never.  I think they should change and shift with us in some respects, because as we grown our dreams should as well.  We learn more of our own heart and can better weigh our dreams in light of that but the idea that age should determine your potential  in this world is ridiculous, and the idea that anyone should tell you to quit thinking outside of their self imposed box is even more absurd. 

In this I"m not saying we should negate responsibility to society or family; however, I am saying that  you should not be afraid to  stand out, you should not be afraid to go againSt the grain, and you should  most definitely not be afraid of dreaming a  crazy seeming  dream(regardless of age).  That crazy big dream that seems unfathomable to others might just well end up being the dream that God has for you, but  until you step out in faith you'll never even be able to guess wat what could be or "might have been".   Don't let life pass you by in fear.

On the age note, if God can make a king of Josiah at age 8, use a teenage girl to birth the savior, send Jesus into his minstry at 30, and use  a 90+ something year old to father the nations  then I would have to say   no matter how long or short your time is on this earth never sell yourself short based on  something as simple as "age".   

REACH FOR THE STARS

If you want to be a lawyer go for it (a shot out to my aunt naomi), if you want to be a dance therapist do it, if you wnat to be a stay at home mom   go for it,  If you want to be an author WRITE( a shot out to my cuz), if you want to   tour the world make it happen,  if you want to be missionary in the middle of the amazon PROPS.   

All things are possible to them that believe and to them that are  willing to do whatever it takes/pay the cost.    

ALASKA!

Some snapshots from the most awesome summer of my life! worked at a lodge off the prince of whales island. FANTASTIC! :)

this is a slide show of some OLD and some more recent shots, all before I realy started to think about trying to do photography in MCD. Before then it was just something I did for myself and never thought about. The ones marked 2007 are ones that I tried to sell as a fund raiser for MCD :) and it did help some for the down payment lol. The rest are just life as I know it.

news update/new ommer of manna # I forgot :)

So, the semester ended, I survived!   I didnt' walk due to certain stressors I was uncertain about,   my mom could care less, my dad  has come to expect failure so I'm a joke when it comes to this ( all pressures off, lol)  but ah who cares! I OFFICIALLY HAVE ALL MY CREDITS FOR UNDERGRAD!  :)  and,  I will walk in December FINALLY- seriously, no stress next semester outside of a class I picked up for a minor which is soooo exciting! Also, despite delays and setbacks   I was given permission to take a grad class which I aced :D I even got a little certificate of competency for on scene  mental triage  :)  Crisis Intervention yeah!

Anyways, all that jabber aside  here is the down low of where I'm at and what happened  in my last moments at school this semester.  I'm currently at my dad's house for the summer helping him  take care of my little sister and  his special needs foster kids.     It's kind of nice not to think about homework.

At the end of my stay though I realized that the $1,300 worth of personal items that seemed to walk away from me  this year weren't lost  but rather stolen by the girl across the hall.   GAH!   They weren't legally able to get her for any of my stuff but I KNOW, due to  having caught her with some of the stuff this more than assumptions.  I was actually more sad for her though than anything in the end.   I don't understand how she could cheat all these people  that she was so close to, I don't understand why she would  like she had no other  options, and I realy dont' understand how she could walk out of there looking me in the face and still never be able to tell the truth about any of it all.  She got caught selling books back that other people purchased(such as her roommate and my roommate)  so they finally ended up suspending her for a year.  In the final moments I'm pretty certain  the reason my camera is gone is because she took it at the same time she took my roommates books but that is a lot harder to prove unless i find it on her or it shows up at a pawn shop with her  name signed to it, so alas it is simply put no more in my life.

Yup, that's right  the Nikon D300 with crop lines etched inside, the Nikkor 85mm  F1.4D AF, Nikkor 17-55mm 1:2.8   that I saved up forever to get walked away overnight.  *sigh*  The funny thing is though, aside from feeling a little strained out of my want to do photography, I realy didnt' break down over this.  Yah, I want to do this badly, but I don't need to I guess.  I love it but it's not imperative to life.

Maybe because it was so big I knew I couldn't do anything so I just let it go and let God.     My education is first right now.  Doing weddings was just an idea of how I might be able to start actually paying for it, or starting to pay back my massive students loans for bible college,  but  the reality of all of this is that no matter the "how"  things happen,  life is so much bigger than me   and ultimately the only one bigger than life itself is God.  So, if i'm following Him I believe  I can't get too far off track or too far under ground that God can't  be glorified  and my dreams, His heart, still come to pass in my life.    

Cool story though:  In the middle of all of this out  of no where, about week one into my camera withdraws I got a message from a distant uncle of mine who just happend to have a D5100 laying around that he would mail it my way if I wanted.   It might not have the sen Nikon sor my last camera did but  it is such a huge, awesome, amazing, wonderful,  exciting blessing lol  :)  that  of course I jumped all over that!    *so it's on it's way in the mail*  And, I realy believe it goes to show how faithful God  is.  I'm not a perfect person.  I mess up more often than not most of the time, but somehow in the middle of that I realy feel God  meets me and still pushes and pulls me forward  in His love.   I am amazed, and that is all I can say.    Why would God care about something such as  a picture as much as me?  :)

So, instead of being bitter, I've decided i the midst of turmoil and blessing that I will be faithful with the little and  use the camera I get this summer to practice practice practice and only better myself in what I hope to use someday as something more than a hobby.   Maybe I'll even post some stuff on here later.  Old and new.

An Elaborate but not Exaggerated retelling of the storm that hit Waxahachie :)

So, Sunday night at roughly 1:21am (which i guess is actually monday morning) according to my clock, the world faded to back for me as I closed my eyes and watched the splashes of light from a distant storm fade against my blinds.    

At roughly 1:46 am I shot up in bed.  It's my opinion this was due to some tap on the shoulder by God or  guttural instinct in my subconscious  of what was about to ensue, because at the moment this happened NOTHING had happened yet.   The room was still quiet, and there was a pitter patter against the window from rains first start; however, no more than a minute after I shot up  looking around, disoriented, trying to figure out why I had, the electricity flickered out followed almost simultaneously by the most God awful sound I've heard in a while.   Wind slammed the side of our building and literally sounded like a high pitch howl from a horror film.  The windows began to  shake and shudder, and the emergency exit at the end of our hall began slamming as though someone was trying to rip it off it's hinges.  Almost immediately I ran into the hall to get my RA and see if  they had access to a weather radio.    My first thought was tornado, my second thought was "if this is not it's still  one bad storm".   The hall was flooded with girls because in our hall NO ONE slept through this event.  You see, we live in the ghetto on campus, lol, so it  pretty much sounded like the whole building was going to collapse despite being made of cinder blocks.   At the time there was in fact no radio out, and all we kept hearing was no tornado  warnings were in place.   We stayed in the halls anyways afraid to stay to close to our giant glass windows found in all the rooms.  Finally, about 20 minutes into this  the wind died, the building was still standing, the electricity was till out,  and we made our way back to room to try and rest before school.  It was hard winding down, but the light lighting and thunder  that followed actually helped to lull me off to sleep.   

As morning beat back the dark  and Waxahachie awoke  the dammage from  the night before none of us on campus knew took place  was revealed.  Thankfully no one in our town was hurt due to the storm.  It turned out we were in fact under a tornado warning but no tornado touched down in our town.  The closest any of the tornados got that night was 5 miles  down the road in midlothian, and they were small.  The irony though was this, despite not being hit by a tornado,  the storm that slammed us  at it's highest point  that night  delivered a punch of 95mph straight winds.  These winds ripped into us like any F1 tornado would have but on a wider scale since the winds were not confined to a funnel.   All over town trees were down,   branches scattered, power was out,  windows blown out, roof tops damaged/ torn off, trees on houses,  etc etc etc.  It was quite the sight to see.  Some buildings were even demolished in part.     On campus the only real damage was the roof of our Music Center( where no one was that night)  which looked like someone grabbed the back end of it and tried to roll it back like it was a sardine can as a method of opening it from the top.  

In the end, the storm that the weather service told us might at it's height have winds of 60mph  and hail under an inch in diamater ended up delivering some surprises that night  with golf ball size hail and winds way beyond the predicted speed.  If you pray  sends  shot out for those whose  homes received damages  to their properties and send up a thanks that  deadly potential wrapped up in this story no one was even injured due to it.   

Below I've attached some photos if y'all want to see, God bless!

NEWSJACKPHOTOS/ALL DOWNTOWN WAXAHACHIE

CELLPHONE SHOTS W/IN 2 BLOCKS OF SCHOOL

Omer 6: "My word does not return void" - God

by Melanie Irizarry on Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 11:48pm

So, a few years back I went on a missions trip to Australia. It was more a music ministry trip I guess than anything else. The group of people that went were from all over but we went under Larry Sturm Ministries. We traveled all over the East coast visiting churches, singing, and sharing testimonies. :) God is good! It was quite possibly one of the most amazing times of m spiritual walk with God. I heard Him most clearly in the most unexpected of places at every turn.

While on this trip I remember one day being out on the beach. We were in the Hervey bay area at the time. I remember there was this older man preaching up a storm in a seemingly meaningless area. Who was watching him aside from the hand full of members from his church that were there? Coming from a non christian background this form of communication always kind of erked me. It seemed so impersonal, detached, and I could hardly imagine how standing in the middle of somewhere preaching to the wind really did any good in light of eternity even as a believer. I had always seen the street preacher who preached without actions attached(i.e. feeding the hungry or clothign the poor at the same time) as something rather of a bad stigma for the church.

"They make us look loud, annoying, and unreal." I began to vent in my own self righteous words to God. "why do you let them make such a spectacle?" But somewhere in the middle of all fo this a still small voice spoke up again. It was almost as if God himself tapped me on the shoulder and said TURN AROUND. So, slowly I peered back over my shoulder. "look at them over there" He said, drawing my attention to a bar on the corner. IT was a neat place actually. It was a stone corner building where instead of having windows the whole facility was open with giant cut outs to the beach it faced. It was rather early in the day and they were already tipsy tervy. But, the look in their eyes spoke miles. As I sat there venting inside about how ineffective this type of ministry was God was saying .. "Look, MY WORD DOES NOT RETURN VOID". Every person sitting on the outter stone wall of that bar was glued to what the preacher had to say. Drunk or not they were being impacted and you could see it in their eyes. Even if they didn't drop to their knees that day I knew they had been changed. God's word truly does not return void.

No matter how it is preached know that in and out of season in the most sacred seeming of ways or most mundane of ways, when the word of God is spoken litteraly lives are changed whether we see it with our eyes are not. 

Omer 5: LOVE LETTERS FROM HEAVEN

by Melanie Irizarry on Saturday, March 28, 2009 at 5:19pm

Romans 1:20 "God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse."

Sometimes when I look around me I think I see God. I'm not talking about the anvil that we pray for to fall form the sky sometimes or the miracles that we hear about where someones arm grows back. I'm talking about seeing him in the ordinary every day that we take for granted. I see him in the ocean, trees, the breeze as it touches me , and the sun as it warms my face,-I see God everywhere. He is obviously not the tree and the wind and the sun but his hand is all over this creation that he loves and he is so intimately entwined that very the imprint of his fingers can be found even unto the smallest core of what we know in science today concerning nature and the world around us. God was so personally involved in the creation/is still that we cannot look at it and gain nothing form heaven- even if we don't believe in heaven.

A few years ago though, I came to a point in my life where I struggled with whether or not to continue in the faith or all together say goodbye to that God I had held most dear for so many years. After much conversation with some friends at my first college began to twist and turn with knowledge I was gaining in my classrooms and my view of the world broadened I started to wonder if what seemed to be a driving point for me for many years wasn't all memories induced by an overactive imagination. Was it possible we could find ALL the answers we needed in a test tube? or in a lab? Could I trust something if I couldn't see it, understand it fully, be outside looking in at it? Was experience real? lol... without going in great detail I had many questions. After being scolded for my belief that the universe was older than a few thousand years at a church i all together quit trying to hold the conversation that may have helped. Without going into great detail it would be fair to say that for a short while I became rather agnostic and bordered towards the thought of atheism. I didn't want to let go of God but being real with myself in my heart I really was sure that it was all together possible he did not exist. I got caught up in the now and threw away everything God had brought me through.

Ironically though, one day , while I was sitting in my zoology class going over cladistics I found my self asking many of the same questions of science. I had no more answers on the other side of that line than I did when I had my faith in God concerning the things that were frustrating my mind. Why? There was still a small spark of hope in my heart that I was wrong in where I had found myself I guess. And, that day in the strangest of places I found God again. We were watching a detailed video on, of all things, Evolution and how the world came to be from nothing to something. I thoroughly enjoy this topic honestly and can say that in the middle of this video for whatever reason I saw the hand of God. I came to a point in my life where even if I believed "evolution" occured that at the beginning of it all was definately the God I had come to know and love in my earlier years. He was there burning his mark into the very basic fabric of our existance in genes... in the unexplicable mutations that instead of degrading information advanced life to progress and press through the ages taking it's physical form. I was thoroughly convinced I had found the very finger prints of God as they pressed down into the clay he was forming us from and still was. God truly is wonderful

The honest truth for me today without a huge conversation is that I have found so many holes held so many conversations found so many places to stand and fall in science and logic that my faith is more simple concerning the whys in my faith in God, and while I love entertaining theories of beginnings and knowledge that comes through deep study and testing at the end of my day it no longer will have any effect on my faith in God. When we intentionally remove God there are many plausible ideas that are not necessarily idiocy by academic standards and can come form honest search, but I Know that I KNOW that God has his hands in everything I see around m eand has made himself known in that.

Even the smallest piece of sand is perfect in and of itself. It's structure forged by the very hands of the God who breathed life into me, counted every hair on my head, hung the moon and stars in their place and today answers the cries of his children- Even if we don't always see exactly what we are looking for He is there working.