Sweet Southern Pearl

Just something I've been thinking about lately... How do you watch a woman who's had such a beautiful life lived for The Lord suffer so much in her last year of life and spend it in so much pain and sickness? She's your best friend - she took care of you when you were little and now you are taking care of her. How do you watch her struggle in her last days of life before Jesus takes her home? How do you sit by her bed and know that these are the last days of her life? How do you leave after each visit, wondering if this is the last time you'll see her and wanting to stay forever? How do you spend three years of your early 20s knowing for sure that your life will turn out one way, only to find out that after all the certainty that God might have other plans and He puts you back at square one?  How do you watch a man who has always been so tough and strong his whole life start to wither away for months and not be able to eat and realize that it's not going t...

    On Friday night, there was an art crawl in downtown Boone. I met up with my friends from Bible study and New Life as we went in the stores and looked at the art and shopped a bit. The stores stayed open hours past closing time for the occasion. I ended up buying one of the rings that I like to call "awkward rings." I wear it on my middle finger, but when it gets too awkward, it can easily fit on my pinky! :)       After art crawl, a lot of us went back to Catalina's for a bonfire. It was so nice to be in the mountains on a cool spring night with a warm fire, looking out into the distance at the huge, still, majestic mountains against the starry sky.    After the fire, Grace and I hung out with Kacie and watched the first few episodes of Keeping Up With the Kardashians on Netflix. Guilty pleasure!! On Saturday morning, many of my friends graduated from HPU! I'm so proud of all of them!     ...

Okay so the title was VERY hard for me to even write. I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea - I LOVE Nicholas Sparks books and movies. I feel terrible even writing this, but everything has a purpose, including this heinous-titled post.   A good friend told me a while back that I have the "Cinderella Complex." That basically means I live in a fairy-tale world where I think that all relationships are rainbows and unicorns and Nicholas Sparks-esque. I took it hard at first, but the more I've grown over the past year, the more I've seen that that's true. YES, I do still believe in fairy-tale romance, but there IS a reality to every relationship.   The book Boundaries in Dating has really helped me to see that harsh reality isn't as bad as I thought, amongst MANY other things (so expect lots of posts about this literary gem).   So I was reading today and after reading this one chapter, I made a crazy connection in my head that scared me to dea...