Relationship advice from the Nicholsons

I'm taking a break from serious subjects to let you in on a little of my life. I spend a lot of time with children and specifically the Nicholson children. In all of the time we're together they say some pretty funny stuff, but I think this particular night tops them all. It started with Lydia giving Tabitha some advice on how to get a boyfriend and escalated from there. So here, for your pleasure, are some dating tips from Elijah (10), Lydia (8), Judah (5), and Titus (4). (Each one is denoted by the first letter of who said it. N means a group effort.)

How to Get a Boyfriend and Keep Him

1. Wear sparkly shoes-L

2. Always wink at boys-L

3. Only introduce them to your cool family-N

4. Don't poot-L

5. Don't lay in the bed till twelve-L

6. Always have honesty-EL

7. Reel them in and keep em-E

8. Always introduce yourself and wear nice clothes-J

9. Wear bright lipstick-L

10. Make sure you don't poop in your pants-T

11. Never EVER take him to mcdonalds-E

12. Don't tell him he's cute. Unless you find him attractive. But do tell him you like him.-L

13. Don't get one that flirts with waitresses. If he does order the most expensive thing, stomp on his foot, and tell him to take you home-E

14. Never gets someone that doesn't like kids-L

15. Always be sure to be nice-JL

16. Be yourself. If he doesn't like you for who you are he's not worth it.-L

17. I will just punch him-T

18. Never forget to brush your teeth-E

19. Always brush your hair and make it look very nice. And take a shower.-L

20. Never wear too much makeup or fake eyelashes-E

21. Get one that's really nice-L

22. Make sure you very don't wear dark lipstick-T

23. Always say nice things-J

24. Never ever get one that has a messy house-E

25. Never get one that wants to get an ice cream tattoo-L

26. Don't get one that has a real snake because you will be freaking out-T

27. Always be very polite-J

28. Don't wear too short skirts-L

29. On your first date, tell him you are just friends. On the second date, tell him you want to take it slow. On the third date, tell him that you want to be more than friends-L

30. When on a date, never wear a tshirt and nike shorts-J

31. No smoochin till you married-E

32. Pretend like you're a ghost-T

33. Always go out in the night time because some people have work-L

34. Never go out in the night time because you will be tempted to go to his apartment-E

35. Always take him out to a fancy place for dinner-J

36. Always tell him he looks very nice-L

37. Always when it's his birthday, give him something you think he will like-J

38. Like some really cool tools-J

39. Or a really big monster or a really small bat-T

40. Put pink rubber bands in your braces. It will show him you are a girly girl-L

41. Give him a really nice hammer-T

42. If he has blue eyes tell him the shine like a pool. If he has green eyes tell him they look like green grass. If he has brown eyes tell him they look like a lake. If he has hazel tell him they look like a rainbow.-L

43. If he looks like he's mean, don't let him be your boyfriend-J

44. If he doesn't have a car, buy him a really cool car-J

45. If you have the money-L

46. If y'all get far enough to marry, learn how to cook really nice and don't order to go and serve it like you cooked it yourself-L

47. Always be sure to buy good stuff with him-J

48. Always be sure to look before you get one-J

49. Make sure you get him a golden shirt-T

50. Always always always make sure you have enough money to buy your own dinner just in case-L

Feeling Single

I've started to write a post on singleness several times, but I always end up deciding against it halfway through. This is partly because I feel like just about everyone has talked about this in some form or another and partly because I honestly have no answers to all the questions. What I want to attempt to do in this post is simply tell you where I am and how I deal with being single in a southern, Christian society that unintentionally tells you that marriage is where every woman is most effective. 

Like most young girls, I grew up dreaming of the day that I would walk down the aisle in a white dress and say "I do" to a tall (or, for 5 ft me, average height), dark, and handsome man who I would make a family and live happily ever after with. In middle and high school, my friends and I would dream and giggle about the possibility of marrying one of the guys we knew and what it would be like with each one. From the beginning I couldn't wait for the day that someone would get down on one knee and ask me to spend the rest of my life with them. I never once stopped to consider that I would watch all my friends do those things while I'm still waiting for the cute guy in my math class to talk to me. I didn't expect to start to feel the twinge of resentment every time I get on social media and see that another person my age has gotten engaged or is celebrating their first wedding anniversary or having their first baby. I didn't imagine coming up on my 21st birthday and not having even gone on a date in 2 years. None of those things were what I had planned out for my life. 

There are days where I seriously struggle with being single. Days where I feel lonely and insecure and decide that I need a man to fill those holes in me, but those are the days that I have to turn to the only One who can fill any emptiness inside of me. There are also days where I rejoice in my singleness and thank Him that I don't have the stress and weight of a family, but neither of those days are the normal for me or the best way for me to think. My regular life doesn't focus on my relationship status because God is using me in ways that are independent of it. 

Of course He does use me in ways that He couldn't if I was married, but most things wouldn't change even if I was. I hear many singles in the church complaining about not having opportunities or feeling left out, but I don't ever feel that way. I'm the director and overseer (for lack of a better description) of the children's ministry in our church, and I have great relationships with women in my church and community-married or not. I can carry on a conversation with a stay-at-home mother of four just as easily as I can with a fellow single college student. My life, relationships, and usefulness aren't hinged upon a ring on my left hand and a man by my side. 

Now hear me out, I want those things very much and am still sometimes impatient with the Lord's timing, but he can use me right here, right now. There's a phrase that I was told a long time ago and don't even remember who said it, but I've clung to it through this season of life. God works all things for my good and for His glory. 

When you weigh singleness against that, it seems to put everything into perspective. It makes it way less of an issue for me. I feel like I'm getting pressured to stay single while also getting pressured to get married, and the weight of those two things can often be suffocating, but I'm reminded that God's work isn't limited by anything. He doesn't look at me and say, "oh, I could use her so much more if she'd just find a husband!" He has my life perfectly mapped out, and the reason I'm single is because this is exactly where he wants me. The reason so many of my friends are getting married is because that's exactly where he wants them. We have to come to a point in our lives where we trust that He's truly working all things for our good and His glory, and when we do, we'll experience a much fuller life-married or not. 

Christmas in Africa

I celebrated my Christmas a little differently this year. I didn't wake up in my bed on Christmas morning and then have a special breakfast with my family. I didn't sit by the tree with a cup of hot chocolate waiting to open presents with my sisters. I actually didn't open a single present on Christmas Day. I didn't get to see or hug a single member of my family. By basically all worldly definitions, I had what most would call a depressing and horrible Christmas, but I don't see it that way. Actually, to be honest, it was the most incredible holiday I have ever had the privilege of being a part of. I spent my Christmas thousands of miles from home in a little place called Africa. 

When I woke up on December 25, it didn't feel like Christmas at all. It was a frigid 100 degrees outside, and I was still fairly sunburnt from a few days before. I got up and got dressed to go to church for a special Christmas service. I sat outside under a tent in a plastic chair in the sweltering heat with some of the most joyful people I've ever met. We sang, danced (yes you read that right, I said danced), and listened to the story of Jesus' birth first in English then in Lugandan. After many hugs and handshakes, we left to go deliver gifts. 

This next section of words will not do justice to what happened at this point, but I'll do my best. First we delivered candy bags to the boys home. They were so precious and started devouring their "sweeties" the second we handed them to them. Next we went to the babies home to give them their much less full bags of candy. They were supposed to be napping so that was a bit of an adventure, and I'm sure the aunties loved us when the couldn't get them to sleep. The next house is where our hearts were really touched though. 

We arrived at the Merimbe Cottage for street girls with five huge boxes filled with an entire tote bag overflowing with gifts for each girl. They were all so excited they could barely sit still as we began handing out the bags. Here is just a glimpse of what it looked like. 

The girls unwrapped their gifts with many shouts and yells of excitement. One even said, "auntie you must hold me up. I will faint!" They were so excited that they would put everything back in their bags to only dump it right back out to look at them again. After they were done, they all came up to us with huge hugs and smiles and many many thank you's. I almost lost my composure when a few of them said "thank you, Hannah. Thank you!" It was truly a sweet time. 

After the girls home we got to deliver gifts to the children's home. They were just as anxious and excited. We very much enjoyed their sweet faces as they opened probably their first ever Christmas gift. 

 

It was truly the best Christmas I've ever gotten to be a part of, and I didn't receive a single gift. The look on these sweet kids faces makes up for not getting to spend it with my family. I hope after you read this you aren't thinking "oh Hannah is such a good and sacrificial person", I hope you see how good our God is, and how precious these children he has created are. 

Love story

Why is it that everything in our culture seems to revolve around a love story. Every book, every movie, and even many people's lives. But what's sad isn't that love stories dominate society, it's that we root for them. As we watch a movie or read a book we long for the girl and guy to kiss, to get together, and at times even to sleep together. We set our friends up on dates with people we think they'll like, and pat ourselves on the back when it works out. But why do we do this? Well I know why. We're driven by love. Our hearts were made to love, but we have to be careful. If we aren't careful we'll forget about the only one who can fill the void of love in our hearts and lives. I've been in love before, and the love of someone else can make you do some dumb things, but being in love with the one who created you is completely different. It's not the kind of love that blinds you it's the kind of love that makes you see things clearly for the first time. Loving him changes everything about you and your life. And loving him overflows into loving others. While love can often times be associated with hurt, his love is all you'll ever need. It's perfect, unselfish, patient, and constant. Part of its beauty is that you can rest in it and find peace. Earthly love is good and a blessing, but without his unfailing love we can't even hope to love anyone else. I'm so unworthy and yet he still offers me his love. With that thought in mind, how can I not give him everything? How can I not live in a way that brings glory to the name of the one who loves me unconditionally? God is a lot of other things, but today I focus on love because that's what I need him to be. Today I know that if I had nothing else, his love would be enough. That was a difficult place for me to get to, but now that I'm there I can't help but share it with you. 

Feelings are bad?

It's been months since the last time I wrote anything, and my brain is just swimming with thoughts to the point where this might all come out a jumbled mess that no one understands. Or maybe it'll make total sense, who knows.  I could write about a hundred different things right now, but my mind keeps going back to feelings. Now I know that sounds a little weird and to be honest it is, but God seems persistent in teaching me about them so here we go. 

If I'm being honest, I'm not a fan of feelings; I actually dislike them quite a bit. They tend to make me stupid, and I never make good or correct decisions when they are involved. I have always fallen in love too easily, gotten angry too quickly, and cried at the most inconvenient times. So basically, I'm a girl, and I don't like it. These past few months I think I've hated feeling more than ever, and God has used that to his advantage. 

I can think of several times in my life when I've hated the fact that I have emotions and feelings, but none of those times can compare to the last 3 months. Name an emotion and I've probably felt it: love, dislike, disappointment, inadequacy, uncertainty, fear, anger, sadness, and the list goes on and on. And for the longest time it was like I had no control over them, and they seemed to just overtake me. I had been completely drowning in my own feelings, but I couldn't understand why it was happening much less how to stop it. I remember one night about a month ago just asking God why we needed emotions. I was to the point were hurt and anger were too much for me, and I was done. It was at that point that God began slowly teaching me. 

Now I could talk about how feelings are important because they make us who we are or about how without the bad we wouldn't have the good, but that wasn't the lesson I needed. I already knew that. What God has been teaching and showing me is how to overcome and control all those crazy feeling and find peace and rest in him and his plan. How is he doing this? Well, I'm glad you asked! He's doing it by putting me in a lot situations that I really don't want to be in. Now, that might not sound like a good thing, but it definitely is. Like so many others do, I've been camping out in my comfort zone (which means by myself since I'm an introvert), and not telling others about these feelings or facing the people who they're toward. He has thrown me into more uncomfortable situations in the last month than the last 3 years combined, and from those my life has made a drastic turn. Friendships have been mended and new friends made. I've been vulnerable and open with people, which is something I'm not good at. From these seemingly bad emotions, some very good things have happened. 

I don't know that anything I've said has made any sense, but I felt the need to get it out. If you got nothing from all of my ramblings, I hope you get this: even when it seems like there's a lot of bad in your life, God can use if for your benefit.  

Although it can often be hard to see, God really does work for the good of those who love him. All of my unwanted feelings haven't just gone away, but God is using them to mold me into who he wants me to be. And just like any refining process, sometimes it hurts and is really hard and feels totally pointless, but if he is being glorified it becomes totally worth it. 

Looking Back

I was recently advised to look back over the past year of my life. This seems like a pretty simple task, but as I began to go back it became obvious that I was going to need time to really think about it. 365 days doesn't really feel like a lot in comparison to the 19 years I've been alive, but I think more life changing things have happened in the last 12 months than in any other time in my life.

In March of 2012 I was in a completely different place than I am now. I was in very serious relationship that I thought would end in a marriage (I was just a little naive), and I was still a senior in high school. My future plans were to go to the University of Mobile, major in education. and live on campus. My parents were divorced, I went to church in Wilmer, and I always had something to do on the weekend. Now exactly one year later my life has not only changed drastically, but I'm also nowhere near what or who I thought I would be. I'm no longer in a relationship (which is a very good and happy thing), and I'm halfway through my second semester of college at the University of South Alabama. I live at home with both of my parents who are remarried, and I'm a part of the amazing South City Church.

It's obvious through those things that my life has changed, but it goes way beyond that. I have changed. I don't mean jut my address or my relationship status but who I am. I'm not the same person I was a year ago. 2012 was one of the driest times I have ever experienced spiritually. It would be easy to blame that on a boyfriend or starting college or even on my parents getting back together, and for a long time I did blame it on those things. But the truth is, I spent 2012 running from God. I was running from my responsibilities as a believer into the arms of anything I could find: an unhealthy relationship, graduating high school, starting college, getting a job and so on (you get the point). All of these things, aside from the relationship of course, are good things, important things, but I was using them as distractions. I was so far from doing the things the Lord was calling me to that I had all but lost communication with him.

I was told recently that as we mature in our faith, the Holy Spirit gets pickier about what he convicts us of. He no longer is just convicting us of sin but also of our motives behind the good things we do. Now even our attitudes come under scrutiny. Well, I couldn't handle that. I wanted to push the Holy Spirit as far away from me as possible, not even taking the fact that He's a part of me into consideration. I spent from March to the first of August putting all the energy and thoughts and emotions that would normally go into my relationship with God into my relationship with a guy. I put him up on a pedestal so that when we broke up, I was devastated. I no longer had anything or anyone to put my faith in since I wasn't planning on giving it back to the Lord. Next I turned to school. I was going to have the best first semester anyone has ever had, and come out of it with straight A's. That lasted all of 2 months, and I ended up making the first C of my entire life. After that it became about just distracting myself with various activities to stay busy, but I was completely empty.

I hope you can see the pattern here. Without the Lord being an active part of my life I had nothing. I was still a Christian for all those months, but I had blocked out all communication with him. I was totally miserable with every part of my life, but I was sure I had everyone fooled. I'm not sure if I actually had anyone convinced I was okay, but I did have a part of myself convinced I could do it without God. I was forgetting, or just ignoring, that we all have a God-shaped hole in our lives that nothing else can fill. I was finally forced to face the music when the holidays rolled around and I wanted nothing to do with them, and I realized just how much I needed him back at the center of everything. It was at that point that I began the slow and difficult process of getting back where I needed to be. I don't really think I'm quite there yet, but I'm on the right track and happy about what God is doing in my life. When I look back, I'm nowhere near where I thought I would be: I'm in an even better place!

This is my story of the past year, and as I was reminded Sunday, our stories are important. With that being said, I want to hear yours! What is God doing in your life? What has he brought you through? Are you where you thought you would be by March of 2013? I want to hear it all!

Control Yourself

Now this may come as a surprise to some of you reading this, but I haven't always been the charming young lady that I am today. Okay, so maybe charming isn't really the word, but if you knew me 6 or so years ago then you would know that these days I'm much more pleasant to be around. Growing up I was a bad kid. I'm not really even sure how my parents kept their sanity for the first 14 years of my life. You're probably wondering what exactly I did, so let me explain. I was extremely stubborn, had an awful temper, and basically did whatever I wanted to all the time. When I was really young, the problem was refusing to do what my parents told me to do. I've been told the story of the time when I was 3 and told my mom, "you might as well go ahead and spank me because I'm not cleaning my room," about a thousand times over the years along with countless other tales of times when I was just outright defiant. Now that may not sound like such a big deal, but the part that carried over into my teenage years is.

As I got older and smarter, this stubborn defiance came out in my attitude. My parents got divorced the summer before I started eighth grade, and for the next few years after that I was mad. I was mad at my mom for choosing to get a divorce, at my dad for never being happy when I was with him, at my older sister for running away from the problem and making me step up, at my younger sisters for needing me all the time, and at my friends for not understanding what I was going through. In case you didn't notice, that's a lot of anger and most of it wasn't fair. I got in fights with everyone all the time. My mom and I had daily yelling matches, and I argued with my best friend on a weekly basis about nothing. I remember countless nights crying myself to sleep because I was so completely miserable. I don't tell you this story so that you can say "awe poor Hannah." I tell you this because I want you to see how ridiculous my attitude was. Was this a bad situation? Yes, it was. Did I have a reason to be upset? Of course I did, but should I have let it dictate my attitude? NO!

I see statuses and tweets all the time where people say things about how the way others treat them decide what their attitude is going to be, but that thinking couldn't be further from the truth. You are the only one who controls your attitude. Let me say that again. YOU are the only one that controls YOUR attitude! Sure people upset you and make you angry, but they aren't the ones who make you stay that way. It's a choice, and you have two options: you can let other people dictate your attitude and by extension who you are, or you can choose to be joyful and positive no matter what others have to say. For me, it took my older sister telling me how stupid I was being before I took control of my attitude. Granted, I'm still a little stubborn (okay maybe a lot) and will attempt to do anything you tell me I can't, but I no longer let anyone else control the way I act, and neither should you.