Hi!
To preface, I have taken four years of college avoiding any form of writing, so please give me grace in this blog. This blog is for me to update supporters, as well as give myself a memorandum of my preparation and traveling in the WORLD RACE!!!! Feel free to spread this, the more who read, the merrier!
Before I start my pre-WR posts, I think there are two crucial things that I should explain about myself that will give you a better feel for who I am, apart from my inheritance in God’s kingdom as one of His chosen children [1 Peter 2:9-10] : my family and my hometown.
First, I love my family. No matter how small, crazy, abnormal, or standoffish they are, my family is there for me in the big things, supporting me through thick and thin. I thank God that He has kept my family small, with only one grandmother and one aunt in my immediate family left other than my mom, dad, brother, and two sisters. Sure family gatherings are rather calm, but isn’t that what most people wish for?
One thing you should know about me is that I love to make observations and find connections between people and their genetics and environments. In my family we have split these traits almost 50/50 in every way: there are 3 left-handed and 3 right-handed people, 3 people skilled in math and science and 3 people skilled in arts and English, 3 people ruled by reason and 3 people ruled by emotion. The more I study my family, the more I realize these differences, but there are a couple of things that occur in all of us. If you look at a picture of us, we are all blond haired (except for my dad, who was blonde when he was young), light-eyed, stubborn, and indecisive. Got to love science!
My mom and dad are two of the most interesting anomalies in the world. They are perfect complements, mathematically speaking. My mom is the emotion and my dad is the reason. They both love us kids as much as they can handle, as well as teach us to have a growing personal relationship with the Lord.
Next are my siblings, of whom I absolutely love simply because they are so crazy. To put things in order, I am the second of four kids, one older sister, one younger brother, and one younger sister. I am closest in age to my older sister, Shannon, who has now moved to Arizona. I have come to cherish time with her much more because of the distance, but constant texting conversations keep us close! Next is Calvin, my left-handed weirdo brother that has now hit that time in life where he believes the computer is the only way to communicate. I was recently told that this was normal for teenage boys – how am I supposed to know? Last, is little Kirstie bird, who has officially outgrown me, yeah, I am now the shortest member of my family. Kirsten is now in high school, maneuvering through the same high school that all 3 older siblings went through before her, attempting to make a name for herself. She is great at acting, as well as diving now, and I have full confidence that people will start to call me Kirsten instead of the other was around.
Second, I am from Bakersfield. To you, this may only mean a good place to stop and get gas/food on road trips through the state, but to me, it has completely shaped who I am to this day. Bakersfield is where I accepted Christ for the first time in first grade, where I truly understood what it meant to follow Christ, met the most amazing neighbors in the world, and experienced one of the most magical childhoods in the world.
Church has always been a big part of my life, much like the rest of Bakersfield. In short, Bakersfield is the descendants of the Oakies and Arkies of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s – a conservative outlier in the political majority of the liberal state. Here church is a cultural thing, not much of a true relational aspect of life. It has been the teaching of some great Sunday school leaders to teach me that church is more than events on Wednesdays and Sundays.
One part of Bakersfield that I now love more that I am gone is the country-lifestyle. We are farmers and oil-tycoons. We love country music and spend the weekends at the Crystal Palace line dancing for fun. The day Buck Owens died here in Bakersfield is equivalent to the day Michael Jackson died to the rest of the world.
Okay, the Bakersfield stuff is very romanticized, please know that we have evolved to society today, but I love to play up the hick-oriented perspective the rest of the state has of us so, sure, we are rednecks!
Well, there’s a thousand words, or just short of it. Hope to post again soon, and my writing gets a little better! God Bless!
