We've put another quarter in the slot – free play! Hit the reset button on a moment this year: what would you do over? Whether or not you analyze your actions – how would you act differently? Would the outcomes shift, or stay the same? From a single sentence to a whole day (and everything in-between), feel free to explain your choice, from how you felt immediately after the moment passed, to any thoughts that ran through your mind beforehand. Take a mulligan!

Graduate school has taught me so much about counseling, relationships, and myself. I would not trade the experiences that I have had over the past year, but something that I have shared with friends in other cohorts is that tending to your self-care and giving yourself permission to make mistakes is vital.

If I could do something over, it would be to learn that lesson faster and relax a bit more, especially during the spring semester. Burning myself out didn't help anyone (certainly not myself), and I hope other students realize this sooner rather than later. Society seems to expect us--or, perhaps more accurately: We seem to expect ourselves to keep full and active lives across a variety of areas, all while uploading filtered photos, tweets, and statuses that lead everyone else to think it's all effortless.

We take full course loads (and sometimes overloads), participate in our churches, volunteer in our communities, tell our supervisors that yes, we can take another client, make room for our families, keep up some semblance of having social lives, and feel our anxiety levels raising because there's another 14-page paper due and a presentation on theory on probably something else that we've forgotten. Not to mention the fact that we come last, because putting ourselves any higher on our list of priorities would seem selfish and wrong. (Or, maybe that was just me spring and part of summer semester. ...)

So, if I could do something over this year, it would be to take better care of myself from the beginning, instead of waiting for stress to build up to the point where I begrudgingly started putting myself first more often and realized that I wasn't going to be struck down by lightning for doing so.

goals with grace: december

I currently use a bullet journal to keep track of my daily goals and to-dos and finally-got-dones, but I like the idea of goals with grace, so I decided to link up!

My goals for December are:

+ practice self-care. The day before and the day of graduation are going to be extremely busy for almost the whole 48 hours, so if I don't take care of myself, I'm going to be very burned out and grumpy. And that's not how I want to remember earning my master's degree. Specifically, I plan to run a minimum of 35 miles this month (approximately 3.5 miles twice weekly). My bonus goal is to work back up to running at least 10k by the end of the month.

+ host a brunch. I really love the heart of the International Justice Mission and I'm currently reading The Locust Effect. I've been wanting to host a casual brunch for some ladies to talk about justice and raise money for IJM.

+ advent. Along with hosting a brunch, I want to introduce Advent Conspiracy to our home life group. Alan and I are talking about the sort of traditions we want to establish for ourselves and the sort of life we want to lead and I think the philosophy of Advent Conspiracy, which I discovered on another blog linked up with Goals with Grace, reflects that.

arbitrary 03.

So, my final semester of grad school happened and I forgot I had a blog. Fortunately, I'm graduating in less than two weeks (God willing)!

+ remember. Please consider supporting a friend's daughter on March of the Living--she is the granddaughter of a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Dachau. March of the Living will enable her to travel to Poland and Israel.

+ nudity. Recently, nude photos of Kim Kardashian made their way around the internet. I found this article, 5 Things I Plan to Tell My Teenage Boys About Kim Kardashian, and bookmarked it because I think the points could be relevant for a variety of situations. On another note, I think we need to talk about the church's view of purity (or at least the concept of purity that I grew up with), because those photos popped up in one of my social media feeds and I wasn't even looking for them.

+ free. Relevant Magazine released a free-to-download Christmas album.

+ vlogs. My friend, Annie, vlogged about youth ministry because I asked her to. I'll be creating a response vlog at some point, especially because she mentions She Reads Truth and some other cool things. (I say "at some point" because if I give myself a deadline, I'll most likely just watch it pass by.)

+ running. Several weeks ago, I broke one of my toes. By walking into a chair. In my own home. I didn't realize how important running was to me in regard to my personal self-care routine, so I'm grateful to be back on the roads again--and just in time for Alan's brigade run coming up soon!

God + The Yellow Conference

A month or so before The Yellow Conference, I started to have doubts about going (again). The newness of buying my ticket had worn off and I realized that it was going to fall during the first week of classes. Plus, I stress myself out with worry over making it to the gate on time. And I would be going to California by myself.

But I joined the Facebook page for attendees and God used it to reassure me of His plan for me to go. As I got to know some of the ladies, I realized that many of them posted about working in ministry or wrote about grace and blessings. In spite of the fact that The Yellow Conference wasn't advertised as a "Christian" conference, I realized that God would be with us.

That boosted my confidence about going for a while, but then about a week or two before the conference, I really dug in my heels. (Seriously, I didn't even ask my friend for a ride to the airport until a few days before I left.)

Sunday rolled around and I overslept and missed Sunday morning life group. On Sunday night, I started to worry about everything I still had to do but felt like I had no time for (i.e. packing). On Monday, two of my clients called to reschedule and I suddenly had a whole afternoon to pack and make arrangements.

I told my friend that I'd been feeling like God had worked out everything for me to go, but I still didn't want to go. She said that she wished I had been in Sunday morning life group because the lesson (the final chapter of Priscilla Shirer's "Discerning the Voice of God") was on obedience.

When you hear God speak and you know it's Him, just obey.

Hearing that gave me such peace that whatever resistance I'd been feeling before then disappeared.

So I hopped on a plane and headed off to California.

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+ she reads truth. I recently read the justice reading plan and thought it was amazing.

+ just breathe. Headspace is an app that teaches meditation. I use it and look forward to my ten-minute sessions at night--sometimes, I don't even make it the whole way through before falling asleep.

+ 9 social justice books. Several of these are already on my to-read list.

+ pillsbury melts molten fudge cake filled cookies. If you have not had the immense pleasure of trying them, I'm sorry. They're amazing. I even sent a PSA text to my home life group on Group Me about them. And then I took three packages to home life group.