3 Things: Break

Let me share a quick update with you today, my friends.  As you may have noticed, I have not posted any updates on this blog for about three weeks now.  I've gotten several emails checking to see if I'm okay.  I am so thankful for such sweet friends through this blog who care about me enough to take time out of their days to encourage me and pray for me!

I'm going to share a few things on my mind that will explain what has been going on and when I'll be back to blogging regularly again.

1.) If you go back over September and October's posts, you'll see that I undertook the 7 Experiment by Jen Hatmaker.  One week of the Bible Study involved fasting from media for seven days.  This was the hardest fast I've ever done, and it also made me realize that there were some things in my life that took precedence over everything else when they shouldn't have.  For example, when I didn't blog for a few days, I felt guilty and obligated to write, even if I didn't have anything to say.

Because of all of this, I decided to take a break from blogging for one month: November.  I suppose this counts as a blog post, but when I made the initial decision, I didn't stop and think about anyone who might worry that I was injured or sick.  I wanted to write today to reassure all of my friends that I'm okay.

I'm spending a month away from my blog, but I'll be back in December!  Only a week away.

2.) My life has been going through transition a bit, and I needed some time away from much of the internet to self-reflect and spend a lot of quiet moments with Jesus for a while.

I don't know how much I want to share, but here is a quick summary of some things that have been heavy on my heart this semester:

• I'm no longer attending the church I have attended for the last three years of college.
• I'm moving to a new house (in the same city) in less than a month.
• Schoolwork this semester has been much more challenging than expected.
• My family back "home" has also been going through a time of transition.
• And finally, God has been showing me a lot of what it means to trust Him outside of every other earthly, human creation.  Sometimes it's hard; sometimes it's simple and delightful. 

3.) For the first time since 2009, I've decided to undertake NaNoWriMo.  If you don't know what that is, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month.  It's been a while since I've written fiction, and I decided that it would be a fun challenge to write 50,000 words this month.

As one who writes for the joy of it, I usually jot down about 2,000 words a day (which almost always goes towards my blog posts), and as a college student I can't afford the time to write twice that.  This is another reason why I decided to take a break from blogging this month.  Now I have the time to write down most of a first draft of my novel in November.

There is a word counter on the right side of my page, so you're welcome to follow along with my progress as I go.

So this is what's been going on in my life the last few weeks.  The break from blogging has been much-needed, but I'm already excited to start back again in a week.

Thank you so much for your prayers and words of encouragement!  I will see you in December.

Two years ago: The Music I Like