great will be His faithfulness.

I will remember the name of your second cousin’s nephew and the girl that broke his heart's dog's name, but I am never ever going to get the name of a song or a restaurant right, and once I've got it wrong in my mind, it's cemented.

I might live somewhere my whole life, but that doesn’t mean I won’t need the GPS to get to the gas station. Don't give me directions...it will not help. The only place I’ve ever been able to navigate my whole life was Haiti, and only because it’s a country that does directions like I do…Turn left at the big tree and keep going past all the chickens.

I apologize 20 times a day. I will apologize for absolutely everything under the sun, including the person who cut you off last month, the waiter who spilled hot coffee on you when you were a child, and for rain when you would have liked sun. I can’t even help it, I’m sorry.

I will take the same picture of the same thing the exact same way dozens and dozens of times, not because I’m trying to capture anything different, but just because it’s beautiful...Drives Matt insane.

I always cook with a recipe in front of me, and I never ever follow it. I never turn off the alarms that remind me of different things throughout the day, but always hit snooze over and over.  I talk out loud to myself, to the Lord, my mom, Gertha, my friends, and most of you, all the time.  This endlessly confuses people.

When someone presents a rule or guideline that I think is ridiculous, I have to fight myself not to do the exact opposite just to be rebellious. Even if it’s a rule I would’ve already followed anyway, I'm sure not going to now that you told me I HAVE to. 

I leave cabinet doors open left and right. Sometimes Matt gets home from work and walks into the kitchen and starts laughing because every cabinet we have is wide open, and I don’t even realize it till he does.

No matter how hard I try to adjust them, I always consciously or subconsciously set my expectations so high that I leave almost every event disappointed because the most meaningful conversation known to man was not had or because it didn't all go just as I had impossibly hoped.

I can’t spend money. I hate it. I can’t enjoy things that cost too much money. Or things that I think cost too much money. I'm still angry that Old Navy flip flops aren't $1.99 like they used to be, because I have been wearing Old Navy $1.99 flip flops 350 days a year for the past 20. 

I hate change, even good change, even needed change...even getting rid of a couch that is totally falling apart that we hated even when it was brand new, simply because it holds so many memories and I hate changing them. 

I am never ever going to be as skinny or as smart as I want to be, as I wish I was. Doesn't matter what I do or how I age. 

I hate the pressure to keep up with the Joneses so much that I will hold onto the old model / old way to a fault just to NOT do and want and have what everyone else is doing and wanting and having. 

I can only text in complete sentences with perfect punctuation, like an old person, and I can’t read that newfangled stuff. Our 80+ neighbors text better than I do.

I am fiercely loyal, to a fault. If the ship is going down, if all the flags are red, if all the crew has bailed, if loyal makes no sense....I'm still going down. 

Write your own list of all your shortcomings and irritations and stubbornnesses and weaknesses. We may be frustrated with them. We may be fed up with us. We may feel alone...we may feel hopeless to pull ourselves out of these snares of self.

But He is not frustrated. He is not far off. He is not finished.

Lay all that aside before these vibrant truths.

I have never walked alone.

You were with me through it all.

Broken hearts 

Broken bones

You have always held me close.

There's no place that I could go

Heaven's high or hell below

I have lived enough to know

Anywhere with You is home.

I live with confidence

that nothing in the Universe

could ever separate me from

Jesus' everlasting love

There's no height and there's no depth

True in life and true in death

You keep your covenant

Great will be your faithfulness.

Hallelujah...

Christ the Lord is with me.