PVCC

A little while ago (okay, a long while ago) our youth group had the opportunity to go to Prairie View Christian Camp (PVCC) in Ark City, KS, to do some service projects for them.  We painted several of the rooms in the boy's cabin, and did some other work in there.  Let me tell you... the girl's rooms are way nicer than the boy's!  But the rooms looked way better after we left. ;)  Some of my really good friends and I had the idea to paint a Nacho Libre room.  If you haven't seen that movie, watch it now!!  It's soo funny!  But the room turned out "really good".  Actually, all the rooms turned out "really good".  Here's some of the pictures from the trip:

NACHOOOOOOOOO!!

MUSTACHES!!

LEVITATION!!!

Your Grace is Enough?

^"9 But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. ¹⁰ That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong." -- 2 Corinthians 12:9-10

"My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness."  Wow.  God tells us right there, "I'm all you need.  Stop trying to do it by yourself."  So why do I still try??  

I guess it's probably human nature to try to fix things for yourself.  It's just something we do.  If something breaks, we fix it.  If there's a problem, we fix it.  We have a terrible habit of relying on ourselves and no one else.  But when we have a problem with our spiritual life, try as hard as we might, we can't fix it.


I try and I try to do things myself.  Try to fix my attitude, be nicer to my sisters (even when they get on my nerves), resist my temptations, blah, blah, blah.  The list goes on and on.  Everything's fine for a while, but when I do it myself, the problems always come back.  We (I) need to realize that we can't do it by ourselves... only God can do it for us.  We need to give our weaknesses to Him, and He will make us better.  After all, His "power is made perfect in weakness."


But the thing is, it's hard to trust in a something you can't see to fix you.  This is the thing I struggle with most, just not being able to see Him.  Not being completely assured that He's there.  Especially in the rough times.  Don't get me wrong... I know He exists and that He's there for me, but sometimes it seems like nothing's happening.  And completely committing yourself to something you can't see is tough!


God asks us to completely surrender ourselves to Him.  But I'm still trying to figure out how to do it.  When will God's grace become enough for me?  Honestly, right now I don't have much figured out... I'm still trying to get a grip on my relationship with Jesus.  And it's really hard to give everything over to Him.  But I love Jesus, and, by giving things over to Him one at a time, He's strengthening my faith.

 ⁵ "Then I let it all out;
      I said, "I'll make a clean breast of my failures to God."

   Suddenly the pressure was gone—
      my guilt dissolved,
      my sin disappeared." -- Psalm 32:5 (Message)

 "My guilt dissolved, my sin disappeared."  Praise the LORD, O my soul!

In Case You Were Wondering...

For everyone who doesn't know me (even though I seriously doubt that anyone who doesn't know me is reading this blog), here's a few facts about myself: my name is Brooke Nicholson.  I love photography, singing, writing, some sports (but I'm really terrible at any kind of physical activity), computers, and LAUGHING!  Ask anyone... I laugh at everything.

I have three sisters, Bekah, Faith and Laurel

Here's my whole family:

In case you wanted to know more about me (and even if you could care less), there's some crazy, random questions for me to answer!


How would people describe your personality (if they could only use ONE word)? Are they right?
People would probably describe me as shy... which isn't right at all!  I am shy until you get to know me, but once you do, I talk waaaaay too much.  Mostly blurting out stupid things without thinking about it first...


What celebrity/celebrities would create a “Star-Struck” feeling if you saw them in real life?
Star-Struck?  Ha!  I don't know about star-struck... I don't know about celebrities either.  Really, what is there in most of the Hollywood celebrities that we should look up to?  I'd love to meet Kari Jobe (if you don't know who she is, you NEED to find out!  Head on over to karijobe.com) and get some tips from here.  But the person I'd probably like to meet the most would be... Samuel Potter!  He's an awesome, AWESOME photographer.  If you've never heard of him, check out his website.  You'll be amazed.


Are you a hopeless romantic?

Umm... I don't think so?  What exactly is a hopeless romantic?


Be brave – tell us something very random and weird about yourself.
Something weird... hmm.  It's hard for me to think of even one weird thing. ;)  There's lots of weird things about me... things that I think are normal, but other people think are weird.  I listen to this radio drama that Vision Forum produces called Jonathan Park. It's about a creation scientist and his family.  The stories are kind of cheesy, but the message is good.  I've learned soo much about apologetics, and I bet I could argue with any evolutionist.


What is your greatest fear or strange phobia?
I used to have this huge fear of tornadoes.  Every time there was a tornado warning, I'd start freaking out... even hyperventilating.  And it's worse since we don't have a basement!

Movies: Action, Drama, Romantic Comedy, Documentary, Comedy? What are your favorite genres?

I like all movies!  Except horror movies.  There's no way I'm watching a horror movie.  My favorite movie is the Italian Job, and ALL SUPER HERO MOVIES ARE AMAZING!  Especially Spider Man.  Romantic comedies are ok, but they're so predictable, you almost know what's going to happen before you start watching it.

Books: Fiction, Non-Fiction, Romance, Biographies, True Stories, Self-Help, Devotional/Study? What are your favorite types of reading material?

The best series in the world is The Mark of the Lion Series by Francine Rivers.

 EVERYONE should read them!

Music: Funk, Rock, Country, Jazz, Classical, Film Score, Blues, Classic Rock, Crooner, Alternative, Heavy Metal, Techno? What are your favorite types?
Anything Christian!  Well... I take that back.  I like good Christian music. ;)  Stuff like Hawk Nelson, House of Heroes, or Hillsong (weird.  They all start with h).  Absolutely NO country music!  I live in Kansas, and it's Country Music Country down here.  Everyone listens to it!  It's playing everywhere you go, you can't get away from it.  Besides, it's all about the same stuff.  "My girlfriend just broke up with me so I went drinking last night and drove my old, beat up pick-up truck into a ditch this morning."  That's a pretty accurate example of country music, huh?

Name one weakness of yours (confession is good for the soul).

Correcting people.  If someone sings something wrong, or reads something wrong, or just does anything wrong at all, I have  to correct them.  I don't know why!  Bekah, my sister, has started calling me "mom", or "master" when I correct her.

If you could live anywhere at all (and take all your loved ones with you), where would you go?

Actually, I like where I live right now.  In our pretty, old farm house.  Not in the middle of nowhere, but not in the middle of a busy city.  The cold is a little too... cold in the winter, but it's almost spring, so I'm feeling optimistic right now.  If I could visit a city, I'd visit either New York or Rome.  New York would be cool because you could see all the plays on Broadway, and Times Square!  But Rome would be cool because of the all the historic stuff.  

What is one of your favorite things to catch a whiff of?

Ok... this one's weird.  But my favorite smell ever is cologne.  I don't know what it is about it, but it smells so good!  They should make cologne for women... :)

When you leave a social gathering, do you wish: You would have talked more or You would have talked less?

Probably that I would have talked more.  Unless I said something stupid.  Then I wish I could take it back!

If money wasn’t a factor, what stores would you shop in? 

Probably where I already shop.  I'd just buy more!

What are your favorite animals?  

Dogs for sure.  They're so smart and sweet and loyal.  Dogs make you feel better when you're down too. :)

That's all for now, folks!    Hope you enjoyed it. :)

The Weather Outside Is Frightful...

The weather's just great outside, isn't it?  HA!  It's a blizzard!  The wind is blowing so hard I can't even see the school right down the block, and I can barely see the park across the street.  There's some places where you can see the ground through the snow, but some places the snow is a foot deep, so you can't even tell how much we've gotten.  Everything's canceled, and it's really, really cold outside.  And just three days ago it got up to 72°!!  That's crazy!!  But I guess it's Kansas for ya.

We took advantage of the warm days and went to the zoo on Friday.  I think everyone else in the city of Wichita had the same idea, though.  Everywhere we turned there was some screaming little kid.  Once, Laurel was using my camera to take pictures of the tigers.  One very bold (or very rude) little girl actually tried to grab the camera out of Laurel's hands to look at the picture she took.  I carried the camera from then on.  Aside from the little kids, it was pretty fun.  

My mom and I were walking through the rain forest exhibit, and she was telling me how she could be a missionary.  "I could definitely deal with this," she said.  "Can't you see us being missionaries in a jungle like this?"  I was just about to tell her, "No way!" when a tiny bird ran past our feet.  My mom, not knowing what it was, screamed bloody murder, which made me scream too!  Everyone around us started laughing, and one guy walked past us and said, "That was funny."  And it was!  My mom will NEVER live that one down. :)

Something Bekah will never live down is her irrational fear of the fish tunnel.  You know that glass tunnel in the rain forest exhibit you walk through that has fish on every side of you?  Well... Bekah's afraid of the fish.  She thinks the glass is going to break on top of her, and a fish is going to eat her head.  And those are her exact words.

It's so funny!  Look at her hiding her face with her hands!  Ah... sorry Bekah.  I just had to write it.  Don't kill me, please. ;)

Here's some pictures of our zoo trip.

That poor little goat got his head stuck in the fence.  Bekah says he's being shunned.

But whenever you fed him, he slobbered all over your hands.  Yuck!  (You can't see it, but Bekah's hands are covered in goat slobber.)

Faith and Laurel are oblivious to the creepy guy in the background.

The sheep knew where the food came from, so every time someone bought food, they'd all crowd around the machine and lick the food out before the people could get it.

You can see my reflection in Bekah's glasses.

Even my dad's doing it!  But, of course, I was the one who spoiled the picture and didn't do it.  But it's not so bad, because I did it later... kinda...

Tiger training!  See?  Everyone in the city is there!

Then afterward, we went to Orange Leaf for the first time.  It was really good, but a little expensive.

And, oh yeah, NO BRACES!!!!

Fan... Or Follower?

I'm sure that everyone who goes to my church already knows aaaaall about this.  But it's still a great thing to talk about.  The question is: are you a fan or a follower of Jesus?  Fans know everything about the person (or in this case, God) they idolize.  In the case of a pop star, or sports player, or anyone you look up to, you know their likes and dislikes, where they live, what they do, who they're dating at the moment, blah, blah, blah.  You may have never met them before, but you still know tons of stuff about them.  With God, you may know every single book of the Bible and the Fruits of the Spirit in order, every king in Israel's history, and the exact year that Jesus died on the cross, but, really, do you honestly know him?  As my pastor said, we don't need to be Jesus' fans... We need to be Jesus' groupies!

If you love a certain person, you want to talk to them every day, all the time.  It never gets old.  You want to be with that person... you want to experience life with them, have them near you all the time.  You share every detail of your life with that person--nothing's hidden from them.   That's how it should be with God.  Even though He already knows everything you do, speak, and think, He still likes to hear it from you.  He wants you to desire to talk to Him, share the details of your day.  God doesn't desire a distant relationship... He desires an intimate love relationship.  And you don't have to worry about giving Him your heart because He'll never, ever leave you. Even when it seems like He has, He hasn't.

I know it's so hard with all that goes on in your life.  And God's not exactly a person in the flesh that you can sit down and talk to.  You have people pulling you every which way and you never know if you're doing exactly what God wants.  I have to check myself constantly to make sure I'm not making decisions with my emotions instead of what God wants.  But I know that if I stay on the right path and keep going with God, everything in my life will turn out fine.  Yours too!

So here's the question: are you a fan or are you a follower?

OCC

It's taken me forever to post this!!   Honestly, it's just been sitting in my drafts for a week.  So, when it says "the weekend", it means LAST weekend.

I just had the opportunity to go to the most amazing college ever for the weekend: Ozark Christian College.  It's located in Joplin, MO, and it's completely centered around God.  Everyone there is totally amazing, and all the professors there always blow me away with how much they know about and love God.  I went with my church (which consisted of Me, my sister, my mom, and two other girls.  Normally there's more that come.. I don't know why they didn't this time!) for a high school retreat called "The Event".  Pretty creative name, huh?  The whole topic for the weekend was "Your World".  It was all about the world we live in, how we treat it and the people in it.  We learned about how we live in so much excess, and there are people around the world that have absolutely nothing.

When you think about it, we do live in a lot of excess.  Think of all the food we throw away:

This is a diagram of how much food the average American family of four in 1995 wastes every month.  It's ridiculous!  That's enough food to feed Whole villages in Africa for a week!  The average amount of food thrown away by a family of four is 122 pounds per month.  6.4 billion pounds of edible food was wasted in 1995--about 1 pound per person!  That's edible food.  Think of all the Chinese buffets and fast food restaurants that throw hundreds of pounds of food away a day.  With just the United States' waste, we could feed whole countries.  For reals.

And think about us.  We're always wanting something more... some toy (like a MacBook for me), clothes, house, boat, car, etc. WE LIVE IN EXCESS!  It's ridiculous when you think about it.

So, I know that there are people around the world that are starving and don't have homes, but the problem for me is: I don't want to give up my stuff.  I'd rather forget about the starving little African children and buy my MacBook.  We'd--I'd--just rather tuck the problem away and forget about it.  They can have their little corner of the world and we can have ours.  Let's just forget about it, right?  *Errrrrrrrrrrrrr!!* (Haha... that's a buzzer)  WRONG!  I admit, it would be nice, but we can't.  What if your family was starving?  You'd think people were just downright selfish for buying a MacBook instead of saving your family.

But the great thing is that there are orginizations like World Vision (as you probably already know) where you can sponsor a child right from the comfort of your home.  And it's really cool, because you can send letters to your sponsored child and they send you letters back!  It takes a super long time, but you can still communicate with them.

I'm not saying that you can't but that MacBook (or whatever your heart desires), just spend a little time, money, and thought on others.  You'll be glad you did. :)

The Hallelujah Carnival

The Hallelujah Carnival was last night!  Even though Bekah and I were supposed to do it, it was still much my parents' work.  It was a success as far as I know--I was stuck in the spin art room most of the time.  Pretty much everything went off without a hitch.

Except that, as we were setting up, the moon walk guys came to set up the moon walk about two hours early--which wasn't a problem.  The problem was that we were originally going to have it inside, so we ordered a blow-up twister board that didn't have any walls, so it wouldn't touch the ceiling.  The delivery guys supposedly "upgraded" us to one that had walls!  So we had to move it outside.  Which turned out to be ok, because more people could jump on it, and the kids had a blast.

Another problem was the fish pond.  We had a blow up kiddie pool to use as a pond, but we procrastinated on blowing it up to see if it had any holes in it until the last second.  Of course, it did.  Luckily, someone from the church brought us one of theirs to use.  We couldn't really drag a hose into the church, and it would be too heavy to fill it up then bring it inside, so we had to carry pitcher after pitcher of water from the kitchen and dump it into the pool.  Just as we were done filling it up, water started leaking out from the bottom of it onto the carpet.  So we had to dump it out and try to find another pool!  A couple from church called everywhere to try to find one, and just as all hope was lost (haha... just kidding.  It seemed like it would be a cool thing to say) they found one!

The only thing about the carnival is: I don't know what it does to minister to people.  Never once has someone come up to me and told me that it made an impact in their life--and no one else has gotten told that that I know of.  It's just something that our church always does (with the exception of last year), and I think people just kind of get used to it.  It might have made an impact in someone's life that I know nothing about... God may be working in mysterious ways--as He normally does.  I sure hope so.  That's what I pray for.