A Joyful Heart is a Thankful Heart

I've truly seen rock bottom and touched the clouds all within the same calendar year. I've cried tears to fill buckets labeled lonely, dark, hollow, hidden, sad, and overwhelmed. I've also filled those same buckets with peace, happiness, joy, thankfulness, and smiles. I had been on an emotional roller-coaster for what seemed like decades and I found lots of sadness in the sunniest days of the year. Do you want to know something really remarkable, though? Over the past year, I've found more joy in myself than I even knew existed.

As I wrapped up my last assignment and final of the year today, I felt moved that another year has come and gone. Another year of filled notebooks, twenty pound backpacks, sleepless nights, and extremely overloaded calendars and agendas. Another year of new friendships, old friendships, and discovering your own heart has come and left, yet again. I can't even imagine that next year is my last year of undergraduate schooling and that it will all be over then. What I do know, though, is that I will not let another day slip by where I allow someone to easily steal my joy away from me.

I have found that when I decide to make every experience into a joyful one, I'm so rewarded beyond even my wildest dreams. I have found that when I tell the Lord that he can have everything, and not just my leftovers, that He sincerely blesses me with way more than I deserve. I have found that smiling and laughing will help us to see things in a positive manner. Here is one of my most joyful pictures thus far and I love it. I'm not perfect, but I'm changing. I'm getting better, stronger, faster, louder, and more full of joy.

"I am learning what it means to be a woman—what it means to embrace all of my femininity and to see it as a loving calling. To know the difference between love of self, and loving myself, and to treat myself as tenderly as I would a friend."

xoxo-polka dot gal