Gracie Girl Blog

On August 30th this year I turned 16. Here’s somethings I’ve learned in my 16 years of life:

Things work out. There are many times where it felt like certain problems would never go away. But usually these issues aren’t as impossible as they seem and in time they will be worked out and forgotten.

God is good. Oh so good. He’s the one who will never walk away. He doesn’t change how much he loves me. He doesn’t just sit in the sky and judge me. He’s been there when no one else was, whether that was the middle of the night, in school, or any situation. He is the one thing I can truly trust to be perfect. In such a broken world, that is everything.

Sometimes, you’re asked to face what scares you the most. Going into middle school, I had a lot of fear. The majority of it was completely irrational (as fear often is), but yet I let it bother me. One thing I feared was depression and self harm. To be clear, these were not things I was dealing with personally, but I was worried I might be confronted with them in either myself or someone close to me. The summer after 7th grade I was able to shed a lot of that fear, I realized how unlike myself I had been. In 8th grade, God asked me to walk with one of my close friends who was struggling with the hard stuff I had been afraid of. So what happened when I was forced to face it? Well, all I could do was lean on God. I prayed SO MUCH. I learned a lot too, and I now feel really familiar with such issues, which is a good thing. I was able to see first-hand that when someone hits rock bottom, the hope of Jesus is life changing. Sometimes it takes hitting rock bottom, to realize just how amazing God is and that He is here.

There are so many people to get to know. I have a tendency (I think maybe we all do) to just want to stick with MY friends in MY comfort zone. I’ve learned the problem with that  is if you lose a close friend or they just aren’t around for a while, you feel so lost. At camp this summer I was able to connect with people I probably wouldn’t have otherwise. There are so many people willing to reach out, who want to be a good friend. Sometimes it’s good to let people go, and pull others closer.

Life gets complicated. I remember sitting down and talking with my babysitter Celinah about my elementary school drama when I was younger. She always told me that it only gets worse. I didn’t really believe her at the time, but now that I’m older I completely understand what she meant. She was right. Not necessarily worse, but complicated. I don’t know why, but as you get older, friendships and conflicts become harder to figure out. Somehow there are just so many more factors then there were when you were younger.

It’s important to find your people. There are close friends who have stuck with you since you were young, but there are so many other people too. Some friends you confide in, others just make you laugh. You need to find people who will laugh with you, cry with you, struggle with you, have fun with you. Just finding people is important. God created us to need each other, and that won’t ever change.

Finding what makes you tick is important. Find your passion, the thing you can do and tune out everything else. For me, it’s horses. I might feel like everything else is a wreck, but when I’m on a horse, a few feet off the ground, my problems seem a lot farther away. It doesn’t fix things, but it puts them into perspective.

God answers prayers you haven’t prayed yet. My best example of this is Wyoming. The first time we went, it was the summer after 7th grade and like I said, I had lived with so much fear. Riding through the mountains I was LITERALLY out of the valley. I also fell in love with the place and the people and horses. I made friends I will never forget. I didn’t know I needed a place like that, but God did. And he was gracious enough to lead me there and show me this little corner of the earth that instantly felt like home. Suddenly, life was a lot less scary. To this day I still find hope when I look back at the memories. Its something that’s so surreal to me and it is just a wonderful gift from God that I could never dream of myself.

Those are just some of the things I could think of 🙂 I’m still learning and I can’t wait to keep walking along this path of life. ❤ Thank you to everyone who made me feel so loved on my birthday, and everyday!