the beginning.

This journey starts out when I was about thirteen years old. If you knew me when I was younger, you know that I wasn't particularly expressive or willing to share my thoughts or emotions. I was totally fine with how I was...I never felt out of place or never longed to be anybody else. My favorite thing to do was sit in my room and think and pray and read...I loved the community that God and I shared. He was cultivating in me such a solid confidence in myself...something I will be forever grateful for. In the midst of those formative middle school years, I began to really think about the world and what a crazy, unfair, wild place it was. Here I was in affluent metro Atlanta in a state-of-the-art, brand-new school with access to pretty much anything I wanted in life. I seemingly had no financial boundaries holding me back, I had a big family that took care of me completely, I was able to attend Camp Glisson where I was beautifully overwhelmed with the love of the most incredible people I had ever met, etc. But the realization that not everybody in the world shared my level of prosperity really bothered me. I felt such sorrow and sadness and compassion for these people that I didn't know (and had never met before). My response to these new feelings was to be completely content with the material possessions that I already had...and not desire any new ones. I didn't want any new clothes or birthday presents or Christmas presents...because I didn't want to spend money on things when I knew that other people had nothing. It was joyful for me as I explored all of these new thoughts, but it made my mom CRAZY. I, of course, didn't explain to her my new philosophy on life because I didn't really know how.  I KNOW I was annoying at this point in my life...but I was enjoying life and didn't understand how my lack of communication was extremely maddening to Mama and my sister and other people around me :) (Mama, I'm SO sorry I couldn't explain myself...but THANK YOU for putting up with my bothersome habits!) But I knew that God was up to something in my life that was going to be so revolutionary and it was going to have a whole lot to do with my new feelings towards my possessions. So that's my first step towards Asia (even though I didn't know it at the time.)