Following God's lead across countries and across the street
03 May 2013 1 Comment
Alternately Titled: Natalia Guest Posts
Renee, mother to 14 and fellow blogger, was so kind as to allow me to guest post on her blog. Hop over to Renee’s blog to read what I wrote about my transition from being homeschooled to attending college here at Moody!
*The Roommate, never before pictured on Leadmewhere, appears not once, but twice in my post over at Renee’s blog.
Happy Friday, lovelies!
~Natalia
25 Apr 2013 1 Comment
in Birthday, Blogging, Family, Links, Parental
Photo taken 1993
It’s my father’s birthday today, and seemed like a wonderful opportunity to remind you how much I love him. He’s a wonderful father to his children, husband to his wife, teacher to his students, and example to anyone who’s watching.
In addition to his gentle demeanor and studious work ethic, my father also possesses a highly refined, subtle-sarcastic sense of humor, which has enriched my life in many ways. I have collected for you this evening some reason posts mentioning my father.
He Hugged my Mother at Monterey Bay
He Took Stevy and I to Mexico and We Almost Got Shot (Or Something Like That)
He Influences Larissa’s Sense of Humor
~Natalia
05 Mar 2013 Leave a Comment
in Blogging, Chicago, College, Family, Moody Bible Institute
There’s a contingent of individuals who came across this blog via the Moody Bible Institute website. There’s a page for Admissions and a tab for Connect with Us and a section of Moody students who are in the habit of blogging their days, and my picture is on there. There are five or six thumbnail pictures stacked one on top of the other, with links to blogs next to names and mini bios. Five or six and I’m one of them, and some of those who click here come because of that page.
They come because of Moody.
I’ve thought about what I’d want to read, if I was three years ago, thinking and wondering and planning four years in the Windy City, four years studying at the Moody Bible Institute. If I was a senior in high school once again, what would I want to read about this school?
Sometimes my writing is a little scattered, a little random. If you’ve been around a while, you probably already know that about me. But I work at the pool, that’s an off-campus job, and I work in Admissions, on campus, and the application deadline for Fall 2013 is coming very soon, and the file cabinet in the office is full of heart stories. God’s leading them here. To Moody.
We call them prospectives. What would you like to know about this place, dear prospective?
Would you know about the game room? We have one. Second floor, ASC. You don’t know those abbreviations, but you will, and you can add them to the other jargon we accidentally throw around. Like CPO and SDR and Commons and pretrib and SLAC and systheo. But there is a game room, and I walked by with Mar today, and we stopped outside to talk with someone else, and we all stood in that upstairs hallway while a guy in the game room pretended to hit another with the pool cue and a ping-pong ball escaped the table and rolled away.
Do you want to know about the library? Because I spent the day there. Tall tables, short tables, group tables, single tables; they’ve laced book space with work space and I hunted up and down for an outlet because I want just this desk, but my computer battery lasts about a minute for every year that my dad has lived, and he’s not a very old man. I found an outlet.
Do you want to know about the SDR, that basement dining room? I ate there three times today, then hauled my backpack on and walked all the way down that sloping tunnel, the long window above me receding with every step down.
I could tell you about the laundry room, the floor where I live, the athletic facility, the classroom buildings. This school has become my story these past two years and there is much that I could tell you about.
But I sat in the back of Chapel today. President’s Chapel means Dr. Nyquist spoke, and my highly biased opinion ranks him second behind D.L. himself for best MBI president. I got there early, quite, and I sat right there in the middle, where we always sit. But that wasn’t working and the phone was buzzing, so I did that slow meander walk up the carpet aisle, to the back. I stood and I waited, just a moment or two, to let others fill that red-seat Chapel, to wait for… something. Then I poked my head back through those swinging wooden doors and Mar had appeared in the back rows. So I sat with her. And The Neighbor came, too, and Olivia, as well.
Sitting back here, I can see everything. Not the balcony, of course, I’m too far back for that, but all those heads, backs, jackets, hairstyles in front: I see them. And I sat in the back and I listened to the president with the white hair and the black suit, and I looked over all those people, and I realized that I can’t tell you this. I can’t tell you what it is to settle into that Chapel seat, knees pulled up, and to know a place of family. A place where we have Jesus Christ in common and we all know that we’re bought at a price, and we all live in that God moment.
I can’t tell you what that’s like, prospective. You just gotta come here.
~Natalia
25 Feb 2013 Leave a Comment
in Blogging, Chicago, Moody Bible Institute
I like to celebrate anniversaries on this blog. Whether or not I write about them, there’s a counter on the sidebar, shows up every time I hit publish, and I’m keeping track. 100 posts, 500 then, and still moving forward. Leadmewhere had its first birthday, and then its second, and I marked every one of those days as they slipped past.
The WordPress counter ticked closer and closer to 700, and I watched the digits climb. 700′s a high number, and for some reason 700 posts seemed like so many more than 600. 697, 698, 699, and then 700 came and went and I said to you not a word. I told you about the sweethearts I work with at the pool, how I thought about kissing a goat, and how I’ve completely fallen in love with the Word of God. My post count hit and then dutifully exceeded what seemed to me such a monumental amount, and life both in its tangible sphere, and here in this internet space, continued right along.
I sat in writing class today, and there was a lull in conversation, a lull in my attention, a lull in my desire to be where I was just at that moment. Twelve students, we all had heads bent over paper, listening to the teacher give writing prompts, then falling once again into silence while we wrote, wrote, wrote our answers. But there’s a space on my paper, folded into my notebook, where I didn’t answer her questions at all. There’s a miniature paragraph, just a couple of lines, where my paper took the form of a conversation with myself, and it seemed right to converse with me in Spanish. So there’s words on that page, saying that I’d rather not be, and I wish we’d move on, in my notebook in Spanish. And soon, the assignment was finished and we closed our notebooks, and indeed, life moved on.
Day One was on Friday, and the upstairs coffee shop filled with students in high school yet, and their parents came along, and us Moody student workers, we wear shirts that say Ask Me My Story. And they did. So I told them. I told them elementary education decision when I was 11, and a rejection letter mailed to Mexico after eight years of planning. I told them God works in hearts and three changes of my major because teaching’s too much now. The most recent chapter of this story is last summer, change back to elementary education because what I had thought was so scary might not actually be so. I told them that story, like I’ve told it before, but there’s an ellipsis, not a period, because there are many chapters yet to come, because life is still moving forward.
I went to church on Sunday morning, but it was a rather complicated morning, because the Red Line’s all wonky and I’ve no need for a phone when I’m talking with God, so I got off at North and Clybourn and just started walking without a map. I more or less knew where Moody Church was. I got closer and closer and a woman in heels click clacked all up the wet, snowy street, and I sat in the balcony when I was there. Up in the balcony, when we stood up to sing all those rich, wonderful songs, I looked around at the people and do you know what I noticed? So very many babies in that stained glass window balcony. And I walked home in the slush, but the sun was bright on the sidewalk and my socks stayed almost dry, as I splashed through snow-turned-puddle and I remembered that I’m living a moving life.
I’ve a rather small mind, that stays focused on rather small things, but my sunglasses slid tight on the bridge of my nose, and I looked up at that hot, white orb in the sky, and there was almost comfort in the small that I felt. Because life really does move on. Life moves on to after college, after work, after family, and my life is one long story, but I’m part of a greater story, a story that stretches quite beyond my short lifespan, and this whole world? It keeps moving on.
~Natalia
25 Jan 2013 2 Comments
in Blogging
There’s a million things to write and I’ve written not a one because my evening routine has somehow morphed into perusing my email, checking the blogs that I regularly read, and opening and closing the Facebook tab eighteen times, before I consider typing a single word into the WordPress box.
I suppose I’m overwhelmed by what I could write; there’s so many options. And the obvious solution to my dilemma is to waste the maximum amount of time possible in completely avoiding the issue, before it’s midnight and I’m speed-typing because I know how long I can last sitting with tired eyes in front of a white screen and I’ve fallen asleep with my computer on my lap three times these past two weeks.
I’m completely addicted to solving problems and there’s hardly a breath between “this is what’s wrong” and “how are we going to fix this?”. I’m possessed with making everything good, everything right, fixing everything and I marked the yes box on the survey question that read “Do you consider yourself a perfectionist?”.
I want to do things well and I want to do things right, and I’m tired of falling asleep with a funny settling in my stomach because I feel unsolved, I feel problems.
Here are the problems, I’ll list them for you so we can solve them. I’ll tell you what’s up and since everything can be fixed, this shouldn’t be a long process, should it? We’ll sort everything out and line it all up right and we should be on our way in no time.
I’ve banned myself from Imgfave, Iwastesomuchtime, Pinterest and Buzzfeed. I don’t go there to look at pages, pictures, jokes, and time I have in the past spent paging through the Humor section of Pinterest, I now spend doing other things.
And here’s what those other things are: gmail, google reader, and Facebook. There’s a Skype icon on my sidebar, too, and I was so desperate to waste just a little more time just now, that I clicked “six months” and I’m scrolling through a long-ended conversation that sounds all too familiar because this isn’t the first time that I tried so hard to waste so much time.
I hate telling you this, because really, wasting time online? Of all the things to struggle with, all the things to be upset about, I don’t really have an excuse for all this mismanaged time. I should have a handle on this, I should be way past getting sucked into looking at the profile pictures of people I hung out with in high school and are you picking up on all this ridiculous?
It makes me angry, and I so willingly putter around, clicking on links and circling in and out of the same pages, the same blogs, the same profiles, that I’ve seen the last time I put off writing, not three days ago.
And it always ends the same. I open WordPress, I think a while. I write a post. I tell you what I think, what I see, what I hear, what I believe, and I should be reading each post over again, and I truly do, but it’s hard at night because by the time I’ve finally gotten with it it’s so late that I fall asleep sitting up, my photo screen saver sliding bright images of my little sisters across a screen balanced haphazardly on my knee.
And I finish my post, and I close my computer, and I get ready to fall asleep. And over and over again I tell myself that this will get better; I’ll fix this. Because I can, and next time I snuggle in bed and prop computer on my lap, I’ll read more, waste much less time, and simply enjoy my life more because everything will be under control, everything will be fixed.
Next time, I promise myself, I’ll do this better.
~Natalia
23 Jan 2013 Leave a Comment
in Blogging
Some nights I need to get off the internet.
Need to close email
and Facebook
and all the other tabs.
And shut the computer
and brush my teeth
and turn off the light
and talk to God
to end my day.
I had planned to write,
I thought I’d share a little, maybe.
But not tonight,
I guess.
~Natalia
16 Jan 2013 3 Comments
in Blogging
All of you who read what I write here have at least once in your life entered the words, “leadmewhere.wordpress.com” into the little space at the top of your web browser, searched the phrase, and thereby found this page. That’s how the internet works: you enter an address, you find a page.
Usually.
There is an additional feature of the internet wherein I can pay a small fee per year and my blog URL goes from “leadmewhere.wordpress.com” to simply, “leadmewhere.com”. How neat is that? WordPress offers me the ability to own my own domain, to make this space my own, so to speak, by eliminating “.wordpress” from the URL that individuals (such as myself; yes, I search my own blog on occasion) use to locate this particular blog.
This could be my very own space.
I’ve already made it my space in many ways; writing here, sharing my heart, thoughts, memories, ideas here. But it could be even more mine, with $18 a year, this becomes my own domain. What a thrilling potential.
I decided that this would be a good birthday/Christmas present to give to myself this year. In 2010, I gave myself the program that applies the beautiful, cursive “Leadmewhere” watermark (designed by the brother) to many of the images that appear in this space. Now, two years later, it seemed appropriated to give myself my own domain. I like to write, very much enjoy blogging, and find it reasonable to expect that I will continue to do so for the entirety of 2013.
However, I decided on this self-gift late last summer, and have yet to come through.
Because I’m kind of scared.
Both my brother and my WordPress expert have verified my questions and allayed my concerns about the (seemingly) simple task of removing “.wordpress” from a website address. Nothing is affected, I still get to write, you still have the option to subject yourself to reading what I’ve written. It all works out, with the added bonus of my very own .com.
And yet I wait.
Stevy texted me this evening to notify me that he is considering buying the leadmewhere.com URL and selling it to me for a higher price. I was lying on my stomach on my bed reading the blogs of other, braver, individuals who had boldly created their own .coms and at first discredited his threat. The weight, however, of his motivational joke sunk in when I truly began to worry that someone would indeed purchase my URL before I do, and I would suddenly be a competing title. Oh, the drama.
Unfortunately, this concern did not push me completely over the edge, causing me to actually buy the domain and claim it as my own. But I did write a post about how I have yet to stake a claim on the URL that should be mine, so that’s a baby step in the right direction, right?
~Natatalia
01 Jan 2013 Leave a Comment
in Africa, Blogging, Faithful, Family, Friends, God, Grace, Grow, Mexico, Provide, Remember, Summer
I’m determined to write a 2012 recap post. I love turning around to catch a glimpse of where I’ve been, what I’ve done, what I learned. Through the hundreds of posts I’ve written over the past year, I can dig deep into what He’s already done; get my bearings, and step confidently into what He’s yet to do, because past give reason for present, and faithful then can’t be anything other than faithful now, faithful to come.
There’s a thread of redemption story, of God’s character and grace, winding throughout 2012, and there’s a personal story,too. This blog is a personal account of my life, my heart, and my story is nestled small in the grand narrative of God saves. And that’s what I want to see when I look back at 2012. When days are lined up alongside longer days, and months are tipped end to end in line, I want Him to shine bold amidst the snapshots of life that make up this blog.
I started 2012 in Mexico, ringing in the New Year with the hearts that I call family. Birthday, Christmas, New Years; I soaked in every moment I could, but the cold came every night and I laid in bed in my sweatshirt, blankets piled on top of me, and dread of school settled heavy and tight in my stomach.
A semester that I look back on as rocky, unsure, stressed, I landed hard on God’s gentle grace at every fall, and God’s provision rocked me to the core. Three months of stress culminated in a two weeks in Kenya, during spring break. The western world, the world that I’ve spent my life spinning through, is clean and neat and suffering and death sweeps easily under the rug.
Not so in Africa. There is no rug in Africa and sickness and death is the backdrop of millions. Nine months since my return to this country, and I still don’t know why I went to Africa; man places a question mark on I don’t understand, but God’s will is unmistakable in hindsight and He put Africa in my heart, and maybe someday He’ll tell me why.
The spring semester ended like a marathon, and the shroud of school life stayed thick around me for a while after. School breaks are a funny thing because they inevitably come after days, weeks, months, of fast-paced academics. Go, go, go turned to wait, relax, enjoy in the blink of an eye and I hesitated for a moment, shuffling back and forth, swirling uncertain between a long semester and a wonderful summer.
But life waits for no one and summer 2012 vaulted itself into action with a running start. Weddings, Grandparents, WOW camp, Michigan, cousins, Mexico and marched together, one long train of events created their own routine, and I landed back at school in August excited for another semester.
God’s not more real this semester than last, but He’s close, and we’ve gone back and forth. He knows words before I speak them, whisper them, yell them, and His response pours grace, mercy, healing on a heart that He holds always. Friendships developing in the spring found new depth, and He continued to grow me into who He says I am.
There’s much more than I could say, there’s always more that could be said. But I’ll stop now because I’m not ending; a year is a continuation, not beginning to The End, and there’s not resolution because God’s still working.
I still alternately fight against grace and lying powerless and grateful against its incomprehensible redemption. I still shrug off Child of God, forgetting that the grace-work of my salvation is not a blanket for cold days, but a heart-deep stamp that changes everything I do. I’m still unsure, sometimes stumbling where I wish I was stepping, and falling where I thought I’d not.
2012 was grace and mercy and learning, and 2013 will be, too. Because faithful then is faithful now, and changing dates don’t change a thing to change to character and heart of the God who’s been God since time began.
~Natalia
14 Nov 2012 Leave a Comment
in Animals, Blogging, College, Faithful, Family, God, Happiness, Little Sisters
Because I’ve stumbling unknowingly across the threshold of my most stressful week of the semester.
Because there’s a pit of worry in my stomach, and I might as well get used to it being there.
Because I made a to-do spreadsheet for the week and put it next to my desk, where it grows a little bit every day.
Because, because, because. Because of all of that, it’s a short writing time and I’m tempted to drag down, to drag discouraging with my words.
Because I got a spam comment that read “I was addicted to gambling” and I can’t for the life of me figure out the connection between what I write here and a gambling addiction.
Because I returned to the room this afternoon and The Roommate announced, “Don’t come over here; I’m watching a whale video!” before the door had even clicked behind me, and I first screamed (it’s a short list of things that are more terrifying than whales) and then watched the rest of the video.
Because we had Thanksgiving lunch in the SDR today and Mary Queen proposed a toast to America and freedom from British rule, and we all clinked glasses of water and giggled while our resident Brit rolled her eyes and grinned.
Because, at their request, the little sisters and I watched the Baby Panda Sneezing youtube video.
Because studying is a privilege, even more so studying God’s word, and I’m learning such valuable lessons, and I just don’t want to complain.
Because, because, because, I’m here right now because deadlines fall hard and assignments loom large, but God won’t let me lose it, and I’m clinging to His joy with all my might.
~Natalia
24 Oct 2012 1 Comment
in Birthday, Blogging, Faithful, Family, God, Grow, Writing
Leadmewhere is two years old today and, ironically (or maybe fittingly), I’m really not sure what to write about. I’m not sure if this is a somber occasion for remembering and commemorating the past two years, or a happy time for celebrating the second anniversary of my headlong dive into the blogging world.
Two years ago today, I published a post called First Step to a Good Anything is the Purpose Statement, and slowly opened the door of my life to the internet world.
It’s a funny thing, writing a blog. I know how many people read my blog; I’m honored and humbled by readers who have chosen to read, comment, keep coming back. The things you say and the way that you have responded to my writing encourage me to keep writing, to keep coming back to this page, to this heart-and-mind exercise of blogging.
Blogging is a practice in writing, yes. But even more than that, it’s a lesson in vulnerability.
I’ve grown in vulnerability over the past two years. I really, truly believe that I have. Ask anyone who has known me for a while. Ask my mother. The past two years, and especially the past several months, have seen me developing greatly in this area. Where walls once loomed high and my temper flashed a warning when hurt and hearts wandered too close to my own, there are holes in the wall now. Gaping spaces crumble a little lower with each passing week, revealing a softening heart slowly unclenching amidst it all.
But I didn’t really have anything to do with it.
God is the one who first sparked my interest in blogging, allowing me the opportunity to “practice” for a year, while living in Mexico and chronicling our family’s adventures on Little Family 6.
God is the one who supplied me with the very name for this blog, and who has led me faithfully throughout the past two years of both living life and blogging about that life.
And God is the one who breaks down barriers and changes, develops my heart. I’m not done growing, and I will never reach perfection, but He continues to work, continues to lead, continues to challenge.
Writing a blog truly is a funny thing; the personal accounts that I share can be read around the world. I’m writing, often intimately, about the very issues that lie closest to my heart, to an unknown audience.
God is using, and has for two years been using, this blog as a tool to work in my heart and my life. And maybe, just maybe, He’ll use what is written here to grow others, too.
~Natalia
