Jess's Journal: Life Unscripted

Wow, what a Good God. A lot has been happening over the past couple of weeks. It's hard to comprehend what has been happening lately in my life. I have to admit, there are days where I struggle immensely with my own self doubt. Lots of people go through these days, especially when we interact with others. But enough of the personal, this post is about worship styles. James 4 begins with this: "What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions." Talk about a slap of reality. We're constantly fighting with and against ourselves. We're quick to speak and slow to listen. I'm writing this blog post tying James 4 to the context of worship. Denominations quarrel over methods of wo...

Over the past few weeks of my third year of college, I've wrestled with the battle against my own singleness. As an INTJ, friendships and relationships do not come easily to me. I always wanted things and words to make sense. There are days in which I struggle with verbally getting the words out as eloquently as I put them down on paper. Other times, what I put down on paper is the opposite of eloquent. As an introvert, human interactions expend energy from me. After social events, I need time to myself to recharge. This has been a huge barrier in my personal and professional life. If I'm really honest with myself, it's part of the reason why I am on a different path than what I have originally planned in college. There are times where I wish that my personality was a little different. There are times that I wish I wasn't impulsive in my unconscious mind. Historically, I've struggled with my own singleness for a long time. I never dated in high school, and so far,...

After months of tears, torture, and an endless amount of sleepless nights, it's finally Christmas break. My last Christmas break as a high school student! I can now say that there is one more semester left before I can toss my cap in the air. But enough of all the senior year shenanigans. I can now talk about Christmas! To be honest, I'm perfectly fine with people calling it X-mas. Now before you get upset at me for falling into the secular attempt to remove Christ out of Christmas, let's just say that the abbreviation of Xmas for Christmas is neither modern nor that it is disrespectful.  There is no 'X' in Christmas. Although we all see the English letter X, what it actually involves is the first letter of the Greek name for Christ. Christos is the New Testament Greek for Christ. The first letter of the Greek word Christos is transliterated into the English alphabet as simply the letter 'X'. The letter X has been associated with a long history of th...