Everlasting Love..

Hey ya'll hope everyone had a great weekend and even better Martin Luther King day. I am so excited that I was able to get to share a guest post with fellow blogger Seersucker Sass! I was honored in joining her in sharing my story with God and my journey of finding my relationship with Him. I am also going to share it here on my blog in case you weren't able to find it on hers. This piece means a lot to me and I love getting to share it with you all! Thank you again for many of yours continued support and keep posted for my other blog post!

 Everlasting Love

            Let me start with commending Seersucker Sass on this amazing idea of starting a blog series about God. So many people claim to be Christians, but the truth is being a Christian is more than just saying the word. It’s about waking up each and every day, spreading The Lord's word and all his amazing graces through your actions. I am so excited to share my relationship with God, and I hope that through my stories and experiences, along with the other ladies who appear in the series, we can help other young women find their relationship with him as well.

            When I first sat down to write this blog, I consulted with many individuals, having them read and re-read drafts, probably driving most of them crazy when they saw my email in their inbox, but I want to thank them all dearly for their countless words of encouragement and helping me clearly express all that I wanted to share. I am most gracious to one person in particular that really set out some clear ideas for me. She shared with me that even though many people will not understand the magnitude of my sport, at some point in each person’s life they have felt lonely. Most girls have watched parents, friends, siblings, and social figures such as the Kardashians fill that void with things other than God. Girls my age don’t need to spend the next two decades searching for people, lifestyles, and things to fill this void so that they wake up one day with a broken marriage, wayward children, and in search of the next drink. The decision to follow and love Christ can be made today. I found that decision after leaving behind seven amazing years dedicated to a team that I would give everything to be back with. Dance is what held me accountable in high school, and for that I am ever so thankful for the amazing program I was blessed to be a part of. Dance was my void I was searching to fill when I graduated.  I was a part of a team that when you weren’t there fifteen minutes early your phone rang off the hook with half the team trying to locate you.  I knew that every Friday evening and Saturday morning there was a group of 22 sisters waiting to accomplish the same goal as me, and I knew that whenever I fell of the path, those same 22 sisters would be there to get me back on track. So to one day wake up and no longer have that was one of the scariest moments for me. I feel that  God has blessed me with the opportunity to share my story with you all and I feel honored that he has put his trust in me.

            A little background on who I am before I get started sharing, because I think that’s what makes each story special and important - to know a little bit about the person sharing. My name is Morgan, but most call me Moe. I am 18 years old living what I think is possibly one of the coolest college experiences ever. In my first semester of college, I started an online clothing accessory boutique called Orange Blossom Gals, got a job being the ball girl for the Florida Lottery, scored an internship for this spring with a senator, and made so many other awesome college memories... and my journey has only just begin! My major is communications and political science because {call me crazy} but my hope is to be the first female President of this great country I call home. Being a communications major and a lover of all social media outlets, I thought it was time to learn to blog, which is where my personal blog “Politics, Pearls, and Monograms” came from! I am so honored to be partnering with Seersucker Sass and guest blogging with her and others on a topic that I am so passionate about. So now that you know a little about me here we go…..

            My relationship with God has not always been as strong as it is today, and I am strong enough to admit that. I would say that the biggest growth for my relationship would be throughout my senior year of high school. Your senior year is one of the most stressful years of school in a healthy way. Your senior year is the end to any sports teams, clubs, etc., that you dedicated the last four years of your life to, and sometimes that can be hard to handle. For me, I panicked at the thought of no longer being a member of my schools competitive dance team. So I started doing a lot of soul searching. I know that sounds cliché, but to me, I loved staying busy.  I am a passionate person, so I loved having that one thing to just pour my heart into.

I dabbled in diy projects, reading, and cooking. These activities just never seemed to find my full passion like dance had. A few weeks to the closing of dance, the church I had been going to announced that they would be opening another campus right down the road from me on the lake. My dad had been asked through a family friend to come join him and his wife, so as a family we went. Immediately I fell in love. It was a place of passionate followers of Christ who stood with open arms spreading His word. Each week I took my message notes home and would re-read them periodically throughout the week reminding myself of the message but I was in search of more. I started researching on devotionals and other books to learn more of his word. I became hooked on a series called God’s Girl, and for my first week of college, my parents surprised me with God’s Girl, God’s Girl Devotionals, and my very own leather bound college student bible. Each day I spend at least 15 minutes in one of the books reading about his word. Along with that, I was still able to watch the service via web on weekends that I couldn’t be home, which to me is the coolest thing ever!  A couple of weeks into college, I started wondering what I could do to take my passion for my faith to the next level.

Like I mentioned before, I am a communications major and a lover of all things social media. (My love for social media tends to get me in trouble sometimes, but I am just so intrigued at the impact social media has to society!) I shared verses through my Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, but I wanted to share more.  Most people pass up a Facebook post that is more than a couple sentences long, and I had a lot to say. So I turned to blogging!  This was something new to me, but like anything else I was eager to try it out! By starting my blog and featuring many posts about my relationship with God, I started to realize many things about myself and the world around me!

When Seersucker Sass mentioned to me her idea about this blog series, she talked about feeling like God had laid the words on her, “begin each day with a grateful heart,” and I can remember the day I had that same very feeling. I was home for the Thanksgiving break and attending church with my family. Our Pastor challenged us to not complain for the rest of the year. He said, “for this next month, that’s only four weeks, I challenge you not to complain about the things in your life, because there are people out there that have it worse.” I listened to that message, and I realized there is a lot of truth to that statement! So my holiday break went, on and the day after Thanksgiving came, which in my house hold is Christmas Decoration Day.  Let me tell you, we have some of the most beautiful decorations! The most prized of them all is our 12 foot Christmas tree. My father and I begin connecting pieces and testing lights, only to find ourselves frustrated - there were sections without lights and parts of the tree didn’t look as full. We played with the idea of getting a new tree when trees starting going on sale, because dealing with this tree was getting old.  All of a sudden, my dad stopped, looked at the tree and said, “You know some people aren’t even fortunate to have a Christmas, let alone a tree.  I not only have a tree, but I have a family to share these memories with, a roof over my head, clothes on my back, food on my table, and a little money in the bank.” I stopped to soak in what my dad had said.  His words were so true. So many of us have so much fortune that we discount every day. I now look at each day and find the blessings in each moment more than I ever have, because in that day God reached down on my family to show us that we were blessed more than we knew.

            I hope my blog post, along with all the other lovely ladies, inspires you to take that leap to the next level in your faith. Again I am so honored that Seersucker Sass allowed me to guest blog with her, and I look forward to more opportunities of partnering up. I also hope that you go follow my blog - Politics,Pearls, and Monograms. Thank you again for reading!

   
XOXO,

    Morgan