Monark

We just finished up our Monark Springs National church camp on Sunday :) I had to work during the week, but all the services I was able to be in were a direct response to some challenges I've been facing recently.

This old tabernacle has been around for so long, but this year they've finally made the decision to build a new one. I'm not the most sentimental about it, but I still love it and find beauty in it :)

Everyone was gathered around on the last Saturday afternoon to watch several people get baptized. I always love our little gatherings to watch the baptismal. It's such a sweet moment to sing songs about following Jesus all the way and watch people take a step in showing the world that they mean to follow along the straight and narrow way. :)

It's always a little hard to crowd around and watch, but it almost makes it more special than doing it inside a church building where you have to watch from your pew.

The rest of these pictures are focused more on my family... But it all took place during the week of the Monark meeting ;)

We had lunch together at our house during the week. And now "we" includes a few more people ;)

So... I'll be honest and say that I'm still processing LOTS of stuff right now, but this is my sister and her fiancee, Marvin. This was actually my first time to meet Marvin in person, but I really enjoyed him and honestly couldn't ask for a better future brother! ;) Lord willing, they plan to get married this Fall! :)

I don't know what to put here, except a huge smiley face. ;D

But, for those who don't know...

Let me introduce you to Tyrel. :)

It was our first time to see each other in person since February, so we've been anxiously awaiting Monark for months! lol ;P  I have loved every bit of the way the Lord has led us along to where we are today as a couple, and I'm excited for whatever the Lord holds for us in the future!! :)

Marty, Alyssa, and my little nephew, Brent.

I'm completely lost in the Auntie world when he is around!! ;)

Happy baby ready to travel home :)

The last night Tyrel was here, we got to watch the huge blood moon rise through the clouds. :)

And now, just looking at this picture, sends my mind back over this whole last week. 

I can imagine the sound of the crickets and locusts chirping as Tyrel and I sat under the old open-air tabernacle and joined our voices together with all the other Saints singing hymns. 

I think of the ride we took in my bug one evening with the windows down... just taking life in the slow lane.

I remember the solemnity of the messages we heard, and the sincerity of our prayers together.

Then I think of laughter.

But also of my queasy stomach and lack of appetite.

And I won't ever forget the sunrise I saw the morning Tyrel arrived at Monark. I had just popped out of bed at 5:40 and hurried around to make myself presentable to go meet him. I remember being a little nervous, but too anxious to even care. When I emerged from where I was staying, I saw the most beautiful, peaceful sunrise. So I walked over to the edge of the field and took a few moments to watch the scene before I headed off the the front of the campgrounds to go meet the guys who had just arrived that morning... Well... I was only interested in meeting one guy in particular. ;)

-MarLeahJoy

Flashback

If there is one thing I'm passionate about for my mental well-being, it would be documenting... by taking photos, blogging, and journaling.

At times, I document because I'm enthusiastic about it.

Other times, I document simply because I know I should.

But then there are times when I simply can't and won't do it at all.

I've realized lately that I'm in one of those "can't and won't do it" attitudes. Hehe...

So I looked back yesterday to see when I had last blogged. "Hmmm... 🤔 June 17th for my last post. That's not THAT long ago. There's no need to blog yet!" Ha! Okay, that was half a month ago... 🙄

Then today I somehow stumbled across some old blog posts and read quite a few of them from 2014. Woah!!!! Reading some of those was quite interesting.
I've always been a supremely nostalgic person, so being able to re-live moments of my life is just kinda one of the best things. ;)
I had quite a little proud moment there thinking about how many moments I've captured over the last 3 years through pictures and writing... ;)

Lately, I've also been scanning old film prints from my childhood... Oh my!!! I can't even begin to explain how that makes me feel. lol

My daddy has always been unashamedly goofy! lol

My dad's mom, Grandma Carol, and us girls :)

I barely remember this big ole suburban with bright red interior that we used to drive....

Ranelle with two of our great Grandpas (L to R: Albert Eck and Vada McMillan)

Monark with my cousins (L to R: Maddison, Me, Rodney, Travis)

Michael and me doing our typical... :P

Cutie-pie Alyssa at Monark :)

Alyssa and Ranelle showing off their artwork

Daddy holding me on Christmas Day 

Picnic time :)

Daddy made us several swings throughout the years... we always loved them so much!

This is Alyssa and our neighbor friend, Kelsey, walking into my dad's office that he did structural steel detailing out of.

We always loved to go visit him in his office. I remember having a dead bug collection in there that I would play with (it kinda stunk). :P And we would also draw picture after picture and completely fill his walls up with our masterpieces. :)

Matching costumes with Alyssa :)

I love those last two pictures of my mom. I asked her about them recently and she said that Daddy took them of her when they were dating. 

Ranelle and Nanna... This picture describes Nanna so perfectly! She was always right in the middle of things with us grandchildren. She never minded playing silly games with us, like crawling around on the floor playing "Poor Pussy Cat". 

(L to R: Trenton, Ranelle, Darren, Nanna, Me, Alyssa)

Riding on our favorite "go kart" ;)

-MarLeahJoy

Dynamics of Life

I told myself I wouldn't blog tonight, that I'd be a good person and go to bed and get some sleep. :P But blogging helps me process things...

Today was my last day with my sister and baby Brent. And I wanted nothing but to be with them all day long. This evening, we took them over to my Aunt's house tonight so they can leave bright and early in the morning to head back to West Virginia. I'll admit, I think I lost a few tears when we were having prayer before I left to head home.

Also, I'm not sure if Alyssa being out here the week before the West Virginian camp meeting has actually helped things any... I think it made me just want to sneak in the car with them and not worry about what horrible words my boss might say in the morning. :P

I drove home from Uncle Danny and Aunt Anita's house alone tonight. I was in my little white car that Uncle Danny had just fixed because the power steering line melted again... 

Anyway, I was driving with my window down, and along the way I saw these little head lights up ahead of me that unmistakably belonged to an old VW bug!! That caught my eye and made me smile! :) Of course, when it passed by me, I heard the nice little putter of the engine... So I decided right then and there that I'm going to take the bug to Darrell this weekend and let him fix my exhaust leak. Yay! Lol! I can't wait to drive it again!! 

I've been putting it off, because I didn't want to pay for it. But I think getting my other car fixed caught me in a moment of weakness... :P When it broke down Monday, I realized that fixing the car was going to mess up how much I was planning to put in savings this month. So there's absolutely no point in being grouchy about it and worrying how much it was going to cost! ;P That mindset made me feel a little more free with my money though... like, "What's going to hurt spending a little more to get the bug fixed, too!?" Hehe. 

I really wanted to get the Bug running again this summer anyway. So I'm glad I decided to quit being a tight-wad for a few weak moments and go get 'er fixed!! ;P 

So that thought has kind of been consoling in regards to missing my sister and not being able to be in WV right now. ;)

Plus, little Brent and this smile of his... Oh my...! How can I be sad when he's such a happy little guy?!

Monday... at the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art

Having a little picnic :)

Tuesday... Brent found out he liked the pool pretty good! ;)

Thursday... We all had to say "good-bye" :'( 

P.S. this is like my new favorite picture ever, though! ;)

Momma had an event to go to and couldn't go with us to take Alyssa to Aunt Anita's. So we heard some tearful good-bye's at home. Then we hopped over to Aunt Anita's and had to do the sad process all over again. :P

:)

-MarLeahJoy

Weekend Journal

I worked like a dog all last week on my little room makeover project. By the time Friday rolled around, I still had a lot more to do (before my sister and nephew get here) but I figured I should get myself on down to Guthrie, OK for the last weekend of the assembly meeting!! I headed out after work Saturday afternoon, and as I got closer, Kelsey called and told me to meet them at her brother's farm. I had no clue that "meeting them at the farm" meant mudding in the gator in the clothes I was supposed to wear to church that evening. :P But who cares about clothes when you risk missing out on fun! Hehe!

It was well worth the mess and well worth having to go to town to buy some new clothes before church ;) I made a weekend journal video of the whole thing -- you can view it here.

Washing off the evidence of our fun ;P

The rest of the weekend was a tad more calm, and we went out to town on Sunday afternoon for a little while before I headed home :)

-MarLeahJoy

Free

I'm angry.

Angry at social media and all the ways it has changed me.

I didn't start out angry, but after going full-circle around the subject of social media, that's where I ended up. :P
It all started with a simple statement my mom made that had me thinking about the temptations of entertainment and other things that take our time away from God (and so much more). My mind immediately went to a song in our hymnal. 

"My soul, be on thy guard, Ten thousand foes arise, 

And hosts of sin are pressing hard To draw thee from the skies.

Ne'er think the vict'ry won, Nor once at ease sit down..."

I soon realized that for me personally, two of those "ten thousand foes" was Instagram and Facebook. I wanted to get rid of them! But I didn't want to do it rashly and have big regrets. So throughout the last two weeks I've put a lot of thought and prayer into the matter. 

I feel like God has given me many confirmations that this would be the right step for me to take as a solution to the million-and-one problems I soon saw that social media had created in my life. ;)

My greatest fear in doing this is that I will eventually loose my vision of why I quit and come running back to social media like a little lost child that has finally found their mother in the grocery store. It doesn't help that Facebook and Instagram do not let you completely delete your account. Which is probably the #1 reason people hardly ever stop using it. It's just way too easy to give into the temptation when all you have to do is reactivate your account. So in my down time at work I have been going through my posts and deleting them... one by one. Removing all attachment to my little space online. 

Ironically, I came upon a Facebook post I made two years ago that I still like... ;P So I'm not going to delete that one... If I ever happen to think it would be a good idea to reactivate my FB, that post will be the first thing I see. Hopefully, it will prompt me to turn around and flee back to social-media-less-ness. ;)

Reasons social media is not right for me:

It consumed my thoughts all day long in little, tiny ways.

If I was dreaming about the future... then I had already pictured what kind of post I would share with people when that time came.

If I saw a post of someone who seemed to have it "together" a little more than I did, then I would muse on how I could "best" them one day... supposedly encouraging myself and boosting my self-image. (wrong!)

In all the free time I have had this past week, I was sorting some old papers and ran across some notes I took from church that said, "We should go to bed praying, wake up praying, and have the Lord on our mind throughout our day." :) I've heard that many times before, but I still found myself opening my Instagram first thing in the morning to get my mind running and shake my drowsiness. Shame. I know. :/

I could never get a lot accomplished in a day, like I had in the past.

I didn't notice this one for a long time, because I went through a lot of life-changes during the time I had social media. I could easily blame my lack of productivity on senioritis in high school, photography, going to college, working and college and photography all at once. But eventually my life slowed back down to just working. Did it really take me three years to realize that all of those other things in my life were not the complete cause of my lack of accomplishment? So when I came to the point in my life when I was just working... I began to wonder why I never got a lot accomplished in all that extra time. Hmmm...?

Social Media had me wrapped up in unhealthy jealousy.

This is a little more of a touchy subject; but I've seen it with myself, and I've seen it with many of my friends. So I'll just admit it and put it out there because it's real.

Nope, I'm not talking about jealousy of other people's lives... that's already been covered.

A little scenario might describe what I'm talking about best...
 Suppose you like someone. And you stalk your crush's posts to see what other possible rivalry is commenting and liking their posts. Then you try to stalk what your crush does to make sure that they aren't interacting with someone who could be stealing their attention away from you.
 Unhealthy! That's the only word I have to say about it...

Misunderstandings are real. 

I'll just say that we've become pros at creating captions and writing posts that don't tell the full story. 

Living in our virtual world actually separates us from others.

This was one of my biggest things I felt like I was giving up... My connection to other people. When I would think about it, I would get sad and say, "People will think I don't care about them and what they're doing anymore." Not true. The truth is, when you are on social media, for the most part, you are really focusing on "Me, Myself, and I". You're focusing on what little virtual world you are creating. 

When my mom found out I was deleting all my Instagram posts, she gasped and said, "Don't you want to create a photobook of all your memories first?" I told her ,"No... I have the pictures already saved elsewhere. I don't want to remember my life in this way." And the best way I can describe why I needed to completely delete all the posts is because they held the key to re-entering the door of my "virtual life". I don't need my virtual life anymore because it's not me, and it's hindering me from being ME. And I'm sorry that it took me so long to really realize this. (Because, believe me... I had heard ALL the points that I've just gone over mentioned before, but I needed the Lord to open my eyes to see how it was actually happening in my life.)

Back to the fear of loosing that connection with people, though! 

The connection is good... right?!

But is it really good? I didn't know... And I still don't know.

However, I found an answer that satisfied me when I was talking with a friend about it.

They mentioned how the icon for the internet was originally the tower of babel. It was supposed to connect people. Which again, we ask ourself, "Hey, that's good, right?"

So the original tower of babel from the bible was supposed to be a rallying point and to keep the people from being scattered. This was not in God's plan, and He was not pleased with that at all. He had a better plan! We all know the story of how God separated the people by languages to stop their works. So in reality, man's feeble attempts to connect people ended up separating them more. I can't help but believe that there is no coincidence with this correlation of the tower of babel to internet/social media. 

We've come a long ways in society's thinking to connect everyone, only to really be isolating ourselves.

__________________________________

So what about my experience of being media-free so far?

Well, I'm still in the process of getting everything shut down. But I honestly haven't had a desire to even get on and do my normal browsing through social media. The first week was definitely rough, and I felt so lonely all week. Even through that time, though, I wasn't craving that online connection. 

This past week has been amazing though. I've really felt light and happy. :) I've been able to make other REAL connections with people over the phone and visiting them in person. Plus, I've got a lot accomplished on a project we have going on at the house.

This evening, as I was deleting more posts, I allowed myself to scroll through Instagram a little. And guess what? I was soon was battling unhappy thoughts. Go figure. Lol

By writing this post, I'm not challenging others to give up Instagram, Facebook, entertainment, etc.

I'm challenging you to look into yourself and see what hinders you. It may be none of these things mentioned above... or, it may be that and more. ;P

-MarLeahJoy

By, the way... it still feels weird that I'm doing this. Am I a total psych? :P 

No... I imagine that it just has a stronger hold on me than I realized. Making it feel weird to be breaking above it... to be free. :)