The longest day of my life

I am hoping to post a blog at least once a week to tell stories/keep you guys updated on all of the things I’ve been doing! With that being said, here is my week in review!

Hi all!

This week was AHHHMAZING. In my last blog post, I shared how exhausting last week was. Well, this week felt like a 180, which was a huge answer to prayer! A lot of super fun things happened this week, but there is one day in particular that was the most eventful.

It all started at 6 am on Thursday and ended at 1 am on Friday.

I woke at 6 so I could get on a Zoom call with someone for work. You may be wondering why I had to be up this early if work doesn’t start until 8:30. The answer to that: I was getting on a Zoom call with someone from Ghana! They are 5 hours ahead of us, so I had to get up early to catch them during the day. I was meeting with the dean at Livingstone School of Missions to ask him some questions for a documentary project OneWay is taking on. The only downside to this experience was that the audio was absolutely TERRIBLE. I can’t tell you how many times I had to ask this poor man to repeat himself.

After this call, I made breakfast and relaxed for a while because I was able to go to the building late since I had gotten a headstart on the day.

Once I got to work, I had some meetings and worked on some writing projects until I got an unexpected call from my mom breaking some really sad news. My heart broke for the family affected. The rest of the workday was a weird mixture of working and grieving. After going out for lunch by myself, I came back and went to see my friend Hannah in her office. I was able to get all my tears out and we spent time in prayer for the family. I was reminded all the more of my gratitude for a work environment centered around prayer.

After this, I was able to go about the rest of my workday. I had lots of meetings that I had to go to. One of those being a collaborative podcast meeting. During it, my friend Drew made some hilarious, accidental noises back to back that sent me into a laughing attack. You know that moment when you’re not supposed to laugh, but you can’t control yourself? Yeah, that was me. The laughter was bubbling out of me. I had to put my head down, in order to not lose it. MT, the president of OneWay, was very accommodating to this attack and told me to let it all out. I was thankful.

Upon leaving this meeting, I went to a podcast recording for One80. If you haven’t heard of this podcast, you should look it up! It’s a podcast produced by OneWay that tells before-Christ and after-Christ transformation stories! I got to produce an episode for Margaret (the normal producer) while she hosted! I got to hear the most INCREDIBLE transformation story about a woman who went from dealing drugs to dedicating her life to the Lord and leading many others to Christ! It was seriously such a blessing to hear her story. Our transformation stories are so powerful and hearing hers encouraged me to be more open about sharing mine!

This interview made it a longer workday. Normally I get off at 4:30, but I didn’t get done until 5:30.

On Thursdays, we have Small Group where we split up into smaller groups (hence the name) and read scripture together. This happens at 7, so rather than driving home after work, I stayed in the area and went to the riverwalk in downtown Naperville to further process the news I had heard earlier in the day and to read my Bible. I got there and took a little walk to find a beautiful spot. I found one as you can see from the picture! I was very encouraged by the things I read in Luke. God’s Word remains to be such a light and a refuge for me.

Once I packed up my things, I left and drove to the house we were having Small Group at. The goal was to get through four chapters of Luke, but we were only able to get through one in the hour and a half we were together. There is so much to discuss when it comes to the Bible!

After this, immediately, a group of us went to Crumbl Cookie to try the new flavors of the week. We got 12 whole cookies! If you’ve ever been to Crumbl, you know this is crazy– the cookies are MASSIVE.

With that many cookies, there is no way you'll make it through without milk, so we crossed the street to an Amazon Fresh store. These stores are INSANE. They have hundreds of cameras dangling from the ceilings that watch your every move and track what you pick up as you shop. Kind of creepy. When you walk out of the store, they automatically charge you through the Amazon app. Crazy.

So we got our milk, sat outside, and ate our cookies. Unfortunately, we forgot to get cups, so our only option was to pass the milk around the circle and drink from the jug. That was quite comical.

When we made it back to the house to drop some girls off, we came to find out that one girl’s car had died. Having the mechanical engineer father that I do, I had a jumper machine in the back of my car. Using the machine is a pretty straightforward process, but the five girls standing around the open hood of the car were still very confused. So I gave my poor, sleeping father a call. He walked us through the steps and we were able to resuscitate the car!

After this fiasco, Hannah and I decided she would have an impromptu sleepover at my house. You would think after this long, long day, we would have gone straight to bed. This couldn’t be further from the truth. When we got to my house, we stayed in the car and had a long discussion about life as we typically do and didn’t make it to bed until 1 am.

You can imagine the extreme exhaustion I experienced the next day.

I’m sure you’re exhausted by just reading this.

But, that was my Thursday! The Lord is very kind to fill me with strength and joy through it all!

Thanks for following along!

Some more pictures from the week:)