To trade death for life

So I've seen these shirts around that say "To Write Love On Her Arms". Because inquiring minds want to know, I decided to Google it (my answer to all things lately haha). Anyways, TWLOHA is an organization that helps people who believe they have no hope and are struggling with depression, addiction, etc. They basically take these people who even rehab centers won't touch and love them for 5 days before sending them to a center. For those 5 days they share God's love and hope with them and show them that there are people who care about them, but more specifically that there is One Person who cares about them. The first thing I realized from reading this story is that I want God's love to show through me. I often have a hard time loving people who seem different from me or even that I just don't know very well. I'm praying that God will give me His compassion and mercy.
Besides that, as I was reading the story behind the name of the organization and the first person they helped, one particular part of it really reached out to me.
"She hands me her last razor blade, tells me it is the one she used to cut her arm and her last lines of cocaine five nights before. She's had it with her ever since, shares that tonight will be the hardest night and she shouldn't have it. I hold it carefully, thank her and know instantly that this moment, this gift, will stay with me. It hits me to wonder if this great feeling is what Christ knows when we surrender our broken hearts, when we trade death for life."
I really love this illustration. We as humans are so broken and run down before we give everything to Christ. We constantly do harm to ourselves (although not always physically)because it is the only thing we know. We have no idea that there is something so much better out there. A life blessed by God's mercy and grace and purpose in Him. It reminds me of something my youth pastor talked about in a class we're doing. It seems so ridiculous to us, but when we become slaves to Christ we gain all the freedom in the world. That's always been so interesting to me because it goes against everything we as humans think. Many are afraid to come to Christ because they think they "won't have any fun anymore". But that's not it. As our speaker at Winter Rush said, it's not about pulling the weeds out of the garden, it's about growing the roses. (That was probably a bunch of scattered thoughts thrown together that didn't make any sense to you but they all connected somehow in my mind hahaha.)
Additionally, it's not enough to give Him a part of us. If she had only given him one of her razors but held on to another it would've showed that she actually thought that her way ultimately was better and she couldn't completely trust his way. I do that all the time. You can have this and this, but not that. I don't trust You that much. But I'm not fooling Christ. He knows. Humans are so funny. If we had any intelligence at all we would know that if we could trust anyone with everything it would be the One who created it all. But because we're too dumb to grasp that (or I am a lot of times anyway) He waits patiently as we hand over Him our razors, to trade death for life.

Honest Scrap

The rules of the award:
1) Choose a minimum of 7 blogs that you find brilliant in content or design.
2) Show the 7 winners names and links on your blog, and leave a comment informing them that they were prized with "Honest Scrap." Well, there's no prize, but they can keep the nifty icon.
3) List at least 10 honest things about yourself.

Well, most of the people I would nominate have already been "awarded".. So I only have two lol..
Brittany
Chelsea

1) I'm really not very girly. Except occasionally, I would rather bum around in a tshirt and lounge pants with no makeup. However, I rarely make appearances in public like this.
2) I love cars. It runs in the family. I like new cars, old cars, race cars, whatever. I've driven my dad's rear engine dragster. I would race if I had the time, but school is killing my hobbies.
3) Speaking of killing my hobbies, I used to be in band. I play the flute. I also used to play the piano and I wish I had kept it up. I recently have decided to try to play again. But again, school stinks.
4) I like just about any kind of music. It depends on my mood what I want to listen to, but the selection on my iPod is somewhat humorous. From 80's Queen (thanks to the old days riding with my sister) to oldies to classical to rock. It's all there.
5) I was in the room for my youngest nephew's birth to take pictures. Apparently there was a wager going on about how long I would last, but I made it. :) I'm a tough cookie. Sometimes.
6) When I have kids I want them to be close together. I love my family the way it is, but I wish my sister, brother and I were closer in age.
7) I have first cousins I'd never met until this year. My mom's family is very large and spread out so we rarely all get together.
8) I've never played a sport. Hard to believe, I know. Lol.
9) I was homeschooled until ninth grade besides kindergarten and first grade.
10) I was accepted into Douglas Anderson School of the Arts. For whatever reason I chose West Nassau instead. Lol. No really, I couldn't decide until my sister finally asked me if I wanted a career in music and I said I didn't think so and she told me well then don't go to DA. Sometimes I wonder how things would be different if I had went, but ultimately I think I'm glad I chose West Nasty. Lol. ("I sit alone with my hair, My hair and I we sit alone..." LOL)
11) Oh, and I thought of another one. I would like to travel one day. More specifically, I want to travel through Europe. Spain, Rome, Italy, but also the little beautiful places like Austria, Denmark, etc.

Scores & other misc...

I got my psat scores today. I'm in the 97th percentile with a selection index of 202. Pretty good. National Merit Scholars usually have a selection index between 205 and 215 depending on the state and the scores that year. So, I probably won't become a scholar but I hopefully I'll be a semi-finalist. Which isn't too shabby either. I also got my report card...all A's! And my weighted GPA is up to like 4.5. Yay.
That concludes my good news for this week. I'm pretty much stressing out and it's all Marie Feazel's fault!! (my APUSH teacher) I'm not very happy with her. I have a test in there tomorrow and I kind of have no idea what it's about. And she told us that if our averages go down on that test then she's gonna dump a bunch of work on us. Great. Awesome. Nobody really remembers much about this unit and it's the one she's threatening us on. Anyways besides that we have this newspaper project thing due Friday and she picked the groups so I have to work with some people I don't know or trust...well, more specifically, maybe just one *cough* I don't know or trust. The other two are fine. But that one person just happened not to show up to school today so I don't even know what he's gonna write about and, in turn, I don't know what I'm going to write about! Why did she put me in charge of this thing? And more importantly, why didn't she let us pick our own groups?? Grr. And I have to have my part done by Thursday because I won't be at school Friday.
Which leads to the light at the end of the tunnel. Winter Rush is this weekend!! I'm really just trying to get through all this crud this week so I can get to Friday and get out of that stupid school (besides the book I need to read for AP Lit on the way up and back. ugh.). But yeah I can't wait to leave. I can't wait to see what God's gonna do. I think this year's gonna be a lot of fun!! It'll be fun to break in the newby counselors.. ;) Lol.
Sorry this blog was probably pretty boring. But I needed to vent. :)

The End is Near...

Well, today was the first day of school after Christmas break and we are a few days from the end of the first semester. It hit me today - I'm halfway through my junior year of high school! AHHHH!!!! Lol. It's crazy to think that at this time next year I will be making definite decisions about college. Crazy. It's so good to know that I'm not the one making these decisions because if I was I would make a mess of them. It's never been more real to me than now that God has a plan for my life and it is so much better than mine. Right now, MY tentative plan is to go to UF for Radiology...possibly...I don't really know but that's the idea today. Like I said, God's plans are always better.
I did have some good news today about my current schoolwork. I made an A on both of my AP midterms!! This may not seem very exciting to you or I know a person or two who would tell me that they knew I would pull it out and shouldn't have been worrying about it but I was definitely stressing. All I can say is...thank goodness for college curves. Anyways, hopefully this will pull my average in both of those classes back up to an A. YAY!
Also, yesterday in the mail I got something exciting. It's not unusual for Mom to bring in a few letters from colleges each day but yesterday there was one from a different "League"...Harvard. I opened it to find a letter congratulating me for my high PSAT scores and inviting me to attend their summer school. I haven't received my scores yet for the PSAT/NMSQT (National Merit Scholars Qualifying Test) so I don't know what I made but I guess they're alright for Harvard to have noticed. Haha. Hopefully those scores will be high enough that I will go through the semi-finalist and finalist processes to become a National Merit Scholar, which basically guarantees most colleges' acceptance and WONDERFUL financial packages.
Soo...all in all..I'm excited about finding out what the next few years hold. I know it's gonna go by really fast.

What's in a name?

I decided that maybe I should explain the title of my blog. When I created the blog I couldn't think of anything else, so I fell back on my nickname. I realized it might seem strange to anybody who doesn't know the story, so I thought I'd share. It seems that I've always been drawn to strange nicknames. When I was a toddler I called myself "Dee-dah" (why, I don't know) and it caught on for a while. When my first niece was born we realized that she also might have trouble saying my name so maybe "Dee-dah" could return as her name for me. She had other ideas. Of all the words she could have made out of "Melody", she made "Mammy". Well, actually at first I think it was "Memmy" but over the years it ended up as "Mammy". Of course, as you might guess, the name has raised some questions over the years. One time Kendra said my name in front of a woman...of a different race and she kind of blew up and told us how inappropriate that was and that that child was quite big enough to say my full name. Which she was. But who am I to tell my niece what she can or cannot call me? *shrug* Anyways, the name caught on. Now all my family and half the church calls me "Mammy", although most of my friends at school don't know about it and there's always a long explanation when they're around my family. Lol.