Well, I’m Courtney and welcome to my blog. :) A few weeks after returning to my hometown of St. Louis, the Lord somehow managed to bring me (quite unexpectedly I might add!) to Fayetteville, AR of all places! Let’s just say this move was certainly NOT in MY PLAN…and yet His ways are always so much better then anything I could think up. So here I am, a sophomore at THE University of Arkansas living five hours from home. As a result, my blogging days continue as I attempt to keep family and friends updated on life in the corner of Arkansas and maintain some sense of sanity in this crazy thing we call life!
When the Lord told me to move down here, I literally had a week until school was to start, with no place to live. Once again, He always knows better then I do! He brought me to Lightbearers Ministries where I live in an apartment with three precious roommates and get to live in biblical community with them, as well as attending a discipleship class every week. This semester, we are walking through the New Testament and I am learning SO much!
In the past year and a half, I have changed my major five times…it seems the chances of ever escaping the inside of a classroom are getting slimmer by the day! Although this was not really ever apart of my plan either, I know that the Lord again knows better then I do! Currently, I am pursing a BA in science with a focus in Dietetics and minor in psychology. Aside from studies, I nanny part time and I help out with an inner city minister called Potter’s House, leading a CRAZY group of fifth grade girls, but I love every minute of it!
Last month God opened some new doors and ushered me into a new season of life with an internship for a non-profit from St. Louis called Faith that Works. For about eight months now, God has been breaking my heart for the young women and children enslaved to human sex-trafficking. You can read more about this here. I just launched a $10,000 campaign to go towards a larger campaign alongside FTW to raise money to build a Safe Home for girls currently trapped in the red light district in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. You can find out more about this campaign at http://fightingsextrafficking.blogspot.com/ as well as other information on modern day slavery, human sex-trafficking.
As God has begun to refine some of the desires of my heart and visions for the future, this blog has truly reflected those changes. I love looking back on different seasons of life and to see His faithfulness through the Words He led me to write at different points. Blogging, well writing really, has become such an enormous part of my life in the past year. I love getting those crazy thoughts that tend to consume my mind spilled out onto the paper, where I can then begin to plow my way through them all and wrestle it out with words. What began as a chore to check of my list every week has morphed itself into one of the most anticipated activities of my day.
Unsure of what the future of this blog may hold, for now I will just continue pouring out the depths of my heart as I wrestle it out on the paper. Sometimes, it is so hard to be real, to allow my weaknesses, my fears, my sin, my vulnerabilities to be seen before anyone who reads, and yet I know that in the depths of my pain, my joys, my sorrows, my victories, that I simply write, lay it out there, so that Christ may be lifted high in my life. My prayer for this blog, really, is that the love, truth, peace, joy, forgiveness and freedom found in an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ will echo LOUDLY in every word that pours forth from my heart. I pray that my life continually points back to His faithfulness, that all the glory is His. Apart from Jesus, I am just a broken sinner in desperate need of a beautiful Savior. For more on His story of redemption in my life, check out my testimony HERE.
