What's in a name?

For awhile now, I've been contemplating starting a blog. I've sat around at times with thoughts in my mind of exact topics, yet never sat down and actually did it. It became just another "to-do" in my life that I would complete sometime down the road. So this year, 2012, I'm going to try and set out to do exactly what I've wanted to do all along, share my thoughts with the cyber-world. I've always loved writing. I've kept many different journals, both hard copy and online, but have never really made my thoughts and feelings public to the world. It's a pretty vulnerable place to be. I thank you for coming along on this ride with me.
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"What's in a name?" Shakespeare once wrote those words for his play Romeo and Juliet, which I'm getting ready to teach to my freshmen. In designing this blog, that quote got me thinking about exactly what I wanted to accomplish in doing it. What exactly were my intentions? Would it serve as a simple journal of the daily events in my life or would it be something deeper. As I thought about it, I realized I wanted something more. Yes, I'm sure parts of it would serve to update my friends and family of the things going on in my life, but my main intention was and will always be to let Jesus shine through me. This would be just another way of doing that.

Over the past two years, God has really been working in my life. In college, I let my relationship with God take a backseat to my longing to have a "true" college experience. I became more interested in the party lifestyle and decided that God was something I would get serious about down the road when I was married and had kids. College was the time to have fun and not worry about anything else. Even after graduating, that same mentality stuck with me. Through all the nights of clubbing and searching for "Mr. Right," something seemed to be missing. During this time, my life had hit an all time low as I struggled through some of the hardest situations in my life. I had finally reached rock bottom. God used these situations to bring me back to Him. In September of 2009, I remember going home for Labor Day weekend. As I sat down with my parents, I remember my dad asking me questions about my relationship with God. Immediately, tears began to fall from my face as I told my dad that I wasn't even sure if God existed. I could no longer feel His presence in my life like I had so long before. My dad told me to issue God a challenge -- to show up in my life in a way that could only be explained through the miraculous power of God. So I did just that. Over the next couple weeks, I was blown away by how many "God-things" began to happen. It was at that time that I truly began to seek God for the first time in over seven years.

So once again I come back to the quote, "What's in a name?" that got me thinking about what I wanted to name my blog. In thinking about this, I couldn't get the lyrics of an old Steve Green song out of my head. I sang it many times for church growing up and haven't sang it in years, yet the message of it rang in my mind. The chorus states:

Broken and spilled out
Just for love of you Jesus
My most precious treasure
Lavished on Thee
Broken and spilled out
And poured at Your feet
In sweet abandon
Let me be spilled out
And used up for Thee

I can only hope that my blog serves as a testimony to the life I now live, which longs to be completely broken and spilled out for Jesus Christ. I am in constant awe of how He took a young girl like me, who was so far away from Him, and completely transformed her into a woman after God's own heart.