New Update

Oh man, I lose points for failing to update my blog.

Here’s a recap of what has happened over the last 13 days.

On Thursday August 5, our supervisor, Todd, had a “present” for us. He brought us a new 4^th register. So, rather than saying, “I’m sorry, I’m not a register, I’m a wrapper,” we now must actually help customers. It is supposed to allow us to help more customers, but really, we help the same number because we have to wrap our own jams and jellies and other fragile stuff. And registers 2 and 4 share a credit card machine, so that gets a little messed up at times too. Over all though, I guess it is okay.. Customers seem to like it.

Friday August 6.

Today was criticize everything day. When we take breaks, how we do our shipment..EVERYTHING. Todd was back and was on our cases about everything. It led to the beginning of A LOT of tension in the store, and us not looking forward to Todd coming. Not only were tensions running high in the store, but in the dorms. This day was the day when it was said that there could be no more parties in the dorms because people weren’t cleaning up… Let me tell you about how well that is working… Its not.

Saturday August 7

Today marked the end of the busiest week our company has ever had in any shop. We did 8.5 days of sales in 7 days at our shop. We broke the record by a half day. IT was intensely busy all day.

Sunday August 8.

ITS SUNDAY. That means, service, brunch, nap, nap, snack, nap, service, dinner and friends! What a perfect Sunday.

Monday August 9.

Yey! Popover Monday. If you don’t know what popover Monday is, it is when Greg (a supervisor at work who goes to Rutgers) and I eat popovers on Monday at 815. It is the highlite of our week. And usually when we close things are amazing and we have fun, eventful nights..

Wednesday August 11.

Evidently, this day was magical. Or that’s what I have written on my schedule.. I’m not sure why I wrote that on my schedule, but okay.. This was also the day when the Bluders came and saved me from the chaos of work for a while! Yey bluders! (PS did you guys get Harbor Bars? I thought of that while I was eating one today.) Or maybe they came on the 10^th, and I was off on the 11^th and that’s why it was amazing. I know why! I did 4 loads of laundry, for free, went on the lighthouse boat tour, got a harbor bar, talked to some people on the phone, and got to watch TV. .Is it sad that watching TV made me happy?

Thursday August 12.

Um, well. This day was drama filled at work, but I’m not going there. I talked to a lady on the phone that was here 3 years and just wanted to tell me how much she loved everything. Yes, it was interesting. Yes, I actually listened.

Friday August 13.

I have a new number as of this day. My new favorite number is 1902124. Greg and I will play the lottery with this number.. Well, actually the number is 19,021.24 and it represents the amount of money we did that day. It was the busiest day in the history of the company at our store. And greg and I were there for it and helped us get to that amount. Without us, we would have been at $18,900.

Saturday August 14.

Today marked the day that we did 1000 dollars less than we needed to do to beat our busiest week ever. Tonight was stressful, but also the night that people in our shopped realized that God answers prayers, just not in the most convenient ways. A few of us had been praying that all the drama in the shop would go away, or subdue. We were sick of it, and couldn’t deal with it. One girl in particular was causing about 95% of the drama, and she called tonight to say there was a family emergency and would be leaving and not returning. We hate to see her go because that leaves us a person short and she was a good worker, yet at the same time, we are willing to say goodbye because it means no more drama or name calling and work will be a better place for us all.

Sunday August 15.

I gave another message on this day, then went into work cause we were short staffed. We got people to cover and I went and napped. J (see message below.)

Monday August 16.

Guess what? It was another Popover Monday!!!!!! I worked 1030-10 and Greg and my friend Barbara (the lady who spent 680ish dollars on August 2) called today and spent another 90 bucks. So, Greg and I wrote her letters and shipped the CDs. (Yes, we gave her free shipping)

Tuesday August 17.

On this day, I went to breakfast in town with Champ, Scott, Heidi, Lindsay and Nikki. Then I drove up to schoodic point/peninsula for a while, hit up the Verizon store, grabbed lunch at Wendys, got a harbor bar, cleaned out my car, took a nap, went to our managers house for dinner and then to an Agitha Christy play called, “Murder on the Nile”!

And, I’ll be at school 3 weeks from today! It seems so far away though!

I want to welcome you all to this morning service. Today, I want to talk with you about something that God has been laying on my heart the last couple of weeks. This week has been a particularly hard week for me. I work at the Jordan Pond Gift Shop and the past week is traditionally one of the busiest weeks of the season for shops in town. Everyone’s tensions were running high and made work extra stressful. As I checked my email this week, every time I logged on, I had a new message from someone at school asking for a form that I hadn’t filled out. Or asking me to pick up extra hours at work. I had emails about housing and emails about internships. Everything that had to be figured out before I return to school in a few weeks. My week went on and everyday something else came up that started to weigh down on me. While I was dealing with everything this week, I put God on the back burner in my head. I had it in my head that I could face everything alone and I didn’t need help from anyone. But, growing up, I was always told that God needed to be the center of my life, and turning to him would, in general, make everything okay. It’s one of those hard things to remember in times of stress.

At one point this week, I was sitting at a friend’s house in town and saw her bible sitting out. I felt myself sitting there and needing to open it, I decided to flip through it. As I picked it up, I found myself flipping, naturally, to the page with a bookmark in it. The bookmark was one of those cartoon-ish kids’ bookmarks and had a house on a rock and said something along the lines of building your life on the rock of Christ. Our scripture reading from today tells us that God is our Rock, and the strength of our salvation. As I thought about this week and everything that was weighing down on me, I realized that when my life is centered in Christ, everything is a lot easier to handle. I realized that when I left things in God’s hand and trusted that God would take care of everything, life was a lot easier. I decided that worrying and stressing over everything this week wasn’t going to make things easier, but giving it all up to God may help my mood. I began to open my bible and found myself turning to the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7. A few verses stuck out to me from the whole sermon. Matthew 7:24-27 reads: “24 Therefore, everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 The rains came, and the streams rose. The winds blew and beat against the house; yet it did not fail because it had its foundation on the rock. 26 But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27 The rain came down the streams rose and the winds blew and beat against the house. And it fell with a great crash.”

I began to think about how life is like building a house. To build a house, you need a strong foundation. If we build our lives on a firm foundation, Christ, than we are able to stand firm and stand strong through times of trials in our lives. But if we build our lives on a less stable foundation, then when the winds and hard times come, we fall down. I could feel God pulling at my heart to give all my troubles up to him. I could feel him saying to me, “Let it go. Concentrate on work and let me do the rest.” Psalm 18:1-2 tells us that the LORD is our rock, our strength and shield. He will protect us from everything and by building our lives on him, we can stand strong. When I started trusting God with things this week, and not worrying about everything everyone wanted me to do, my week turned around.

As I began to write this message, I started looking through my bible for any additional resources I may have collected over the years to help me talk about God as our Rock. I didn’t find anything. Feeling dejected, I decided to check my email, and even knowing it would probably cause stress. Maybe there was something there I thought that someone had sent that I had looked over. I pulled up a recent daily devotional that I was subscribed to and read it. They were talking about how life is like a tree. “A tree,” I thought? “I thought life was like building a house?” As I thought about that statement, I decided that we really can learn a lot from trees. The devotion started with something that some ancient rabbis thought was similar to what Jesus said in Matthew 7:24. The rabbis said, “The man whose knowledge exceeds his works, to whom is he like? He is like a tree which had many branches, and only a few roots; and, when the stormy winds came, it was plucked up and eradicated. But he whose good works are greater than his knowledge, to what is he like? He is like a tree which had few branches, and many roots; so that all the winds of heaven could not move it from its place.”

I thought about how trees are flexible and can bend and move when a storm comes. As I hiked around this week, I wondered why not every tree fell during a storm. As I studied more trees, I noticed that the ones that were still standing were the ones with strong roots. And here I was again, thinking about the roots that things are built on. The roots of a tree are like the foundation a house is built on. Everything goes back to focusing on what you are built or made on. It goes back to focusing on the roots. If you have done any hiking in the park, or biking on the carriage roads, you’ve probably noticed some trees that have fallen down. Whatever the reasons are for their falling, one thing is for sure: their root system could no longer support their body above ground. They become, like the rabbi said, a tree with too many branches and too few roots. And down the trees come with the help of a storm, or simply because they have become too weak. A tree with a strong enough and broad enough root system will always be able to support the body of a tree. In the same way, a person with a strong enough life in Christ will always be able to handle whatever comes their way.

In the two passages I have referenced today, Psalm 18:1-2 and Matthew 7:24-27, David and Jesus (The Psalm was a Psalm of David) were talking about essentially, having a strong root system; a strong foundation upon which to establish one’s life. In singing or praying this Psalm, David was re-establishing his foundation on God and strengthening his root system. When Jesus finished his sermon on the mount, he was letting people know that acting upon what he taught was the way to spread their root system so that their lives would not topple over. For a simple illustration, think of a sequoia tree. Sequoia trees are found out west and are enormous. They are the largest trees in the world and some even have bark 4 feet thick. Some of them are even so big you can drive your car through them! But many of these trees fall over and die because they have a shallow root system. They are big on the outside, but their foundation is shallow. When Jesus talks about building houses on the rock, he is referring to the sustaining & protecting coverage of his Father. When we are outside the father’s coverage, we are susceptible to destruction by the elements: the rains of life, the flood waters of temptation, and the winds of spiritual conflict that we don’t even see.

So when life seems rough, like this last week has in my life, all we need to remember is that root system on which we have grown. God is my anchor and even when I feel like I’m toppling over because life is so stressful, God is anchoring me to him and will not let my life crumble. There are times in life when we may want to put God on the back burner in life, but we must remember that he is the one keeping us from toppling over and putting him on the back burner may weaken our roots. He is our Rock, our strength and our salvation. By accepting God into our lives, we establish that root system and it continues to grow with us as we grow in our life with Christ. I want to encourage you this week to take a look at your root system. And wrap your thoughts around the rock so that our lives are anchored on the only thing that will keep us from toppling over like the trees with too many branches.

Sunday Sermon (Aug 8--Blackwoods Campground..)

When I was growing up, I had to wait for a lot of things. I had to wait for dinner. I had to wait to see grandma. I had to wait for soccer practice. I had to wait for vacation, or for my dad to come home from work, or for Santa to come. Waiting was a part of daily life. As I grew up, waiting became easier, but I am still not very good at waiting. I’m not good at waiting to see people I miss, or waiting for the cafeteria to open for dinner, waiting to get off work, or waiting for rain, or waiting for whatever movie I really, really want to see to be released. There are bigger things that we wait for as well, but waiting will drive us all nuts. But, as I’ve thought about all the waiting I’m doing, and all the waiting I’ve done in my life, I’ve come up with four things that you need to do to help you wait well. The first one is to listen to God. The second one is to lean into others, the third is to be present in day to day life, and the fourth is to keep trusting. I want to focus on the first one today. The first way to wait well is to listen to God.

When I’m waiting for something, it usually drives me to silence. And that silence, usually draws me to turn to God. Being silent and waiting for God to act is hard as Zechariah found out in Luke 1. The story, in short, goes like this. Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth are an elderly couple who always wanted a child, but never had one because Elizabeth was barren. One day, an angel visited Zechariah and told him that they would be blessed with a child and would name it John. Zechariah questioned the angel, and had to remain silent until the baby was born. As soon as the baby was born, Zechariah saw that the angel was correct and their son became very important. The silence drove Zechariah nuts, but waiting for God to act was hard as well. There are many places in the bible where people ask God to not remain silent in their life because they feel God is silent. Psalm 109:1 is one of those places and also happens to be one of my favorite cries to God to not be silent in my life any longer. Psalm 109:1 says, “O God, whom I praise, do not remain silent.” But the truth is, God is never really silent in our lives, but he is working in ways that we cannot see, and we need to wait for him to uncover these ways to us. God has plans for us, and slowly but surely, he will reveal his plans to us for our future, just as it says in the verse from Jeremiah.

I’ve come up with 3 truths about God that should be noted here. The first one is that God does not believe in coincidences. Everything in our lives is happening for a reason. We may not see the reason at that time that something happens, but everything in life really does happen for a reason. A friend once asked me if God meant for people to die. It’s a hard truth that we face, and in the times of hurt and pain in our lives, we tend to forget this truth; that in fact, everything does happen for a reason, and God is the only one who knows the master plan for our lives. God is always working in our lives, and even if we can’t see it, he is doing amazing things. It’s a matter of waiting for him to reveal these things to us.

The second truth about God is that he is not compelled to be on our time table. We pray and pray for things to happen, usually in a time when we want God to act right away. But, at least in my life, God usually doesn’t give me an immediate response. I have to keep praying and waiting for God to show me what he wants me to see, but not being on our time table stinks some times. It really does. But we have to remember that God has his own time table and things will happen when they are supposed. Go back to Luke 1 and Zechariah. Zechariah and Elizabeth were old in age we are told before they were blessed with a child. They probably wanted children when they were much younger, but it wasn’t in God’s plan. The third truth is this: God does not play games with people. There are so many times in my life when I feel like God is just playing cruel games with me, and at some point he is going to say, “No I’m joking. Everything that just happened? It didn’t really happen.” But God is never going to say that . There is a lot in life that we don’t get or don’t understand. Romans 8:28 says. “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” God has a plan, but we also need to realize that life isn’t a walk in the park, and sometimes, that plan for us involves pain. Although, if you recall the verse from Jeremiah 29, God tells us he will not harm us. Then, some people wonder, why do we fall and scrape a knee, or why do we have pain and suffering? It’s a different kind of harm that God is keeping us safe from, and we must wait and see how everything falls into God’s plan.

Taking these three truths and remembering them, dwelling on them and keeping our connection with the LORD strong, will make the waiting a little easier. You must remember that God is not silent because of something that we did. We can’t buy into that thought. If we let that thought consume us, we will not be waiting well for the LORD to show us something. We are less likely to wait well and patiently with that thought. Also, a sermon I was listening to once said that having unconfessed sin will dampen the connection with God. This doesn’t mean that whenever we do something bad we should be running to confession. All I’m saying is that God sees our slip ups and waits for us to confess to him that we saw it too. Confessing our sins will bring us closer to God and will make the waiting process easier. Also realize that God’s plan is bigger than ours. My plans right now would be to work the next month and go back to school. I don’t have plans about anything after school. But God’s plan for my life runs the whole course of my life. I can’t see his plan for me until it happens. I was speaking with one of my friends from home this week and was complaining about something. Something minor that I probably shouldn’t have been complaining about because God was in control of it. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but her reply to me was simple. She said, “Amanda, God’s in control. He is God, you are not. Don’t try to move too far ahead of the here and now.” He is God, we are not. What perfect words. We can’t control things and He will reveal himself to us when he is ready, and when he thinks we are ready to see what he has been working on.

So, after all that, how do we ultimately “wait well” in times that God is silent? Don’t let waiting become the center of our lives. My pastor one gave me a list of a few ways to “wait well” as I go about my life. Don’t let it control your every thought. Go about your day to day lives as if you weren’t waiting for this. Taking your focus off of the waiting will make it easier. See beyond the mystery of life. Realize that you wont understand everything in life, and that’s what makes life so wonderful. See yourself and your place in God’s story. Know that you are in the palm of his hand and the story of your life is unfolding before you. Enjoy it. The last one may be the hardest, but it could also be the most fulfilling. Sacrifice my dreams for God’s dreams. We have different dreams then he does, but his dreams are what count in life. The most important one is probably this one. Always keep praying and be faithful to the LORD. Allow God’s silence to work in our lives. Use the waiting periods in your life to become closer to the LORD.

A few months ago, I was looking for a devotional to share at a family pizza night. I came across one that I think goes well when talking about listening and waiting.

God is like coke… He’s the real thing.

God is like General Electric…He lights your path.

God is like Bayer Aspirin… He works wonders.

God is like Hallmark Cards… He cares enough to send the very best.

God is like Tide… He gets the stains out that others leave behind.

God is like VO5 Hair Spray… HE holds through all kinds of weather

God is like Dial Soap… Aren’t you glad you know him? Don’t you wish everyone did?

God is like Walmart… He has everything.

God is like Alka Selzer… Try him, you’ll like him.

God is like Scotch Tape… You can’t see Him, but you know He is there.

God is present in our lives, even when we can’t see him. We need to always remember that. God has plans for our lives, to not harm us, and plans to give us hope and a future.

the last couple weeks

Just a few random photos I felt like updating to start with.

I was going to post something about how nothing interesting has happened since my last post, but that would be a complete and utter lie. But I have no idea where to start about things.

I could start with the 75 year old lady and her mom who have traveled the world and then came into our shop and spent $680 dollars and kept us open an extra 2.5 hours and gave Greg and I

both 20 dollar tips.

Or I could start with my birthday of a fog coated-non existent sunrise from Cadillac, a nap, a bus tour, a cake, and friends.. Oh and a decorated bed.

Or I could start with folding mass quantities of shirts..

Or I could start with how busy the shop has been

Or I could mention that we've had record numbers at our evening Cadillac services.

Or I could start with the fact that I have some awesome friends who send hilariously funny cards about playing dodge ball.

I could start with my trip to the Cranberry Islands.

I could start with my adventures on the Island explorer

Or with the day we took Kayla's raft out on Jordan Pond.

I could start with the conversation Lee and I had with a Polish family after campground calling where the parents wanted us to tell their daughter that 7th day adventist was wrong and Roman Catholic was right. It was quite interesting.

Or Christmas in July.

But, I don't think I will start with any and just leave it with brief descriptions that you just read :) Ask if you want more details on anything .