Summer Seaquest VBS week was a success, and so much fun! What a way to spend my days off! As usual, it brought back so many wonderful memories of my own childhood experiences in the same VBS. A mural painted 16 years ago by my sisters and me hung in the hallway where everyone passes. A different time and era, because no one really paints those murals anymore. I can remember spending hours each day the week before VBS painting murals, decorating rooms, getting things ready for 200+ kids to come and have a blast.

That week before VBS was just as much fun as the real thing itself. There were always friends to play with, teachers to help, and it meant a trip or two to McDonald's. Nothing but wonderful memories can be associated with VBS for me. Our church has done it very much the same in the past 20 years with the exception of a few, and after this year there will be a lot of changes. Change- my favorite word! (Why change something that's working great?) But I'm glad that I have the memories that I do.

I still have a few more days off before going back to work, which I'm so thankful for. It really has been a great staycation. I've been at my parents' most of the week in order to be closer to the church. I've napped nearly every day, rubber banded hundreds of shirts, tie-dyed dozens (with the stained hands and arms to prove it), laughed at the funny skits, participated in the silly hand motions for songs, and just had an overall great week. Due to the exhaustion I'm glad it's over, but do wish there could be more carefree days like that.

On the agenda for the next few weeks: July 18 I will be going to Camp Kulaqua with my sister as the camp nurse. This is the camp I went to for seven years in jr. high and high school. This summer is definitely one full of nostalgia, and I'm ok with that!

Staycation

Twelve days. I'm off work for TWELVE days! I'm ecstatic. I have no definitive plans other than helping in my church's VBS this week. I've never had a true staycation, at least not one this long, and I'm just so excited to relax and not think about work or stress. I'm going to enjoy it.

This week, I bought my first car. I'm so excited. I love it. I've been driving my parents' car for awhile, and decided it was time to get my own. Since one of my parents' cars broke down recently, I felt so badly that I was causing them to have more issues with juggling all the cars. And fell in love with this one.

I think his name is Ron. I have not settled on it, but it seems right.

I've spent the last few days at my parents' while my sisters were in town. It's been a fun time, just being together. From the time I was nine years old, I have kept diaries. I found some of my old ones and got them out, reading some of it aloud to my family. It generated a lot of laughs, until one of my sisters chided my seventeen-year-old self for some of the things I wrote. They weren't things about others (though I did have my fair share of gossip and criticism interspersed) but the things I wrote about myself.

I wrote out the many lies I believed about myself throughout my diaries in high school: I am ugly. I will never be worth anyone's time. I am stupid. I am fat. I need to eat less. I need to exercise more. I have no friends. I am boring, and not worth knowing. Essentially, everything I said about myself was that I'm not enough, and I'm worth nothing. I remember believing those things about myself, but I don't remember them prevailing through so many of my thoughts and actions. It makes me sad to look back on the way I viewed myself in such a terrible way.

I don't know why I thought those things. I believed the lies of Satan and the world, telling me that I wasn't good enough. I was so sure that the minute I believed that I might be beautiful, or that who I am was enough, along would come someone shooting me down, rejecting me. What a fool I would be to think highly of myself in any way, and so I continued on in my self-centered thinking that I was worthless. It isn't as if I had parents who didn't love me, or tear me down, I was well loved throughout my life. Yet somehow I allowed these thoughts to creep in, to take over, to control me. I thought it was ok, even right, to tear myself down.

I hope I can say that I have come a long way. I think I have in learning to see myself as beautiful. It feels wrong to say that, conceited. I don't have false vanity in believing I am beautiful in the world's definition of the word, but in owning my own beauty (because, let's be honest, nobody looks like me-- and nobody looks like you either!). Letting my stubbornly curly hair do its thing, wearing my 4-inch heels even if I am 6 feet tall, and simply not worrying so much because I am not a size 4.

I wish I could say I had a spirit that was beautiful, but I'm afraid that is a long work in progress. I'm more ashamed to speak of where I am as a person, as a Christian, than to talk about my looks. I do hope that one day, people will be able to look back on my life as that of a beautiful woman in every sense of the word.