In no particular order, here are my top eleven events/experiences of 2011:
1. Crave retreat
This one is fresh on my mind because it is the most recent of all these events. The first weekend of November, I attended a youth retreat at Victory Ranch. Crave was part two in a three-week spiritual/faith journey extravaganza (not really sure what else to call it...) The week before, I attended the Emmaus walk with my friend Butler, and right after Crave I went to the National Youth Workers Convention with Butler and Jason. I guess I could just count the whole three-week experience as part of my Top 11, really. Emmaus was refreshing and relaxing, and it paved the way for my current involvement in the Chrysalis community. NYWC was busy and fun and eye-opening. I got to catch up with my good friend Alison, I heard Tony Campolo speak, we had a great late-night visit with some incredible folks at SIFAT, and we shared some memorable road trip moments (like driving south for an hour in Mississippi before realizing we were headed the completely wrong direction...)
But of these three weekends, Crave was the best. I love spending time with the youth (see below for more about that), and this particular weekend we just connected as a community in an amazing way. We were blessed with an incredible speaker and beautiful weather and open hearts... hands down, Crave was the best youth retreat I have ever been a part of.
2. Grizzlies v. Thunder triple-overtime game
I admit, I sort of became more of a Grizz fan as the playoffs went on... and I kind of lucked into tickets to this game. A friend posted on Facebook that she was selling her tickets due to a scheduling conflict, and without giving it much thought I quickly agreed to purchase the two tickets from her. "There's fifty bucks down the drain," I probably thought at the time. My dad and his friend Steve have season tickets, so the four of us piled into the car (Steve wore his lucky tie... so embarrassing) and took our seats in the nosebleeds. It was a school night, and I had agreed to give the chapel talk the next morning, so I wasn't too thrilled about the 9:00 start time. As midnight loomed closer, I began to worry about getting enough sleep, packing my lunch, giving my talk a final read-through (Jason, if you're reading this, yes I did actually have my talk written ahead of time. I specifically remember that.) I was enjoying the game, but the Grizz were losing, and I was at the mercy of the other three people in the car when it came to leaving the game. But then the score was tied. And regulation play was over. And the crowd was roaring. I couldn't even hear my own voice screaming. And then sometime after midnight, somewhere in the first overtime, I stopped caring about sleep and speeches. I stopped worrying and just soaked in the atmosphere, the excitement. The Forum was positively electric that night. It was a sea of white shirts, yellow towel fuzz, Memphians united over something great. We lost the game that night, but I really don't think anyone in the Forum cared. I don't remember that game as a loss. It was simply the best basketball game I have ever experienced. Believe :)
3. SOS week
Here are those GUMC youth again! This summer was my third time to serve in Binghampton with Service over Self, and each experience has been better than the last. Okay, this is a slight detour into 2010, and I don't know why this memory has stuck with me, but I remember going to SOS fall weekend last year, and as we were settling into the SOS building I looked at Jason, the only other adult on the trip, and thought, "Holy crap. We're in charge. People trust me with their kids." Clearly I have ground-breaking revelations in that old-car-dealership-turned-holy-place. Back to 2011... I posted a bit about my time in Binghampton in this post from July. I was blessed to work all week with an amazing group of youth. We were all blessed to serve an incredible family in the Bing--we demolished their kitchen so a new one could be built in its place (I saw the almost-finished product a couple weeks later, and wow. Amazing what we followers of Christ can do!) And we were all blessed to work with Malerie, our energetic, always-positive, encouraging team leader and Ben, our quiet and sarcastic and incredibly patient construction guy. Ben oversaw projects at three houses, but he spent most of his week with us--cutting holes in the floor, replacing rotten wood, removing rats from under the kitchen, spraying for bugs, and teaching us how to install plumbing (then redoing it, so patiently, when we broke some pipes... God bless Ben!) We all got to know Corey, our homeowner Barbara's son, and Tommy, her nephew. We had rap battles and dance contests in the yard (Corey and Tommy showed us all up). We planted a flower bed, we made a giant slip-n-slide in the yard using a tarp (we also killed some grass... oops...) and we grew closer as a community of believers. God is truly at work in the Bing... and every experience I have there makes me love Binghampton even more.
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| Slip-n-slide fun! |
I learned a tough lesson this year about praying consistently for something and not getting it. Yes, it sucks. Yes, I'm still struggling with it. I still have moments when I am angry and confused and disappointed. But the bigger picture is that I'm learning how to shift my focus from what I want and toward what God wants for me. Maybe not getting what I ask for is a blessing. There's no "maybe" about that--not getting what I want is definitely a blessing. If I had my way all the time, my life wouldn't be what it is today. And I am so, so blessed. I wouldn't want another life! If I got everything I wanted, I'm pretty sure I'd be married to Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid (my dream guy from childhood) and I'd be working at Colonial Williamsburg, which was my dream job when I was thirteen. So glad neither of those worked out!
I got off track. My point here is that not getting what I wanted is a blessing in disguise. It's part of a plan. It got me thinking, and praying, and I'm scared about where all this thinking and praying will lead me... but I have a feeling that change is coming in 2012. And as scared as I am, I'm also really really excited to see where God will lead me.
5. Cave tubing in Belize
In June my family went on a Caribbean cruise. It was my third Carnival cruise (our second as a family) so to shake things up I decided to try something new. Luckily my brother was game, so when we docked in Belize he and I set off on our own to go cave tubing! I'm pretty sure I was terrified. Cave tubing sounded muddy, and I hate mud. There was hiking involved, and I tend to avoid hiking because I'm allergic to nature. There was a two-hour bus ride in a foreign country, with no cell phones, and the thought of being completely off the map like that is a little disconcerting. But we did it! And it was amazing! We took a two-hour bus ride to the caves, followed by a 30-minute hike through the Belizean jungle. We saw leaf-cutter ants, pineapples in the ground, and what have to be the biggest palm fronds in the world. And inside the caves... incredible. Glistening limestone walls, stalactites and stalagmites, waterfalls, turtles, low overhangs giving way to gigantic caverns. We even saw some bats flying around! The pictures I took with my underwater camera aren't stellar... I found the image below via Google search, but it doesn't do the caves justice either. Those caves were among the most beautiful places I've ever been. It's in a place like that--a dark, damp, flooded cave--that the wonder of God's beautiful creation truly hits you. Look at how much care He put into even the darkest of places!
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| photo from www.belizecave.net |
Other than Memphis, my favorite city is Chicago. I have a theory that if Memphis dropped off the map, all Memphians would just pack up and move to Chicago. My brother moved to the Windy City for grad school this year, so I had the opportunity to head up there twice in 2011. The first time was this summer, when we took a weekend to frantically hunt for an apartment. We spent two days riding around with apartment brokers, touring everything from dingy, terrifying basement apartments to beautiful century-old homes in Wicker Park. We stressed and worried and lost sleep and panicked over this apartment hunt. And finally, on our last day in Chicago, we saw our last apartment--two bedrooms, hardwood floors, granite countertops, on the twelfth floor of a luxury condo building with a view of the lake and Millennium park (Matt will tell you that the elevator full of twenty-something girls was a selling point as well). Sold. Matt and his roommates signed the papers that night. It was a classic lesson in the pointlessness of worrying. God had it covered; we just needed to let him do his thing.
My second trip to Chicago in 2011 was a few weeks ago. Our family is starting a tradition of visiting Chicago around Christmastime. We stay in a hotel downtown, sleep late, pile on layers of clothing, and spend the days wandering the streets looking for things to do. (We do this in the summer too, but with fewer layers of clothing.) This year we rode the Megabus up to Chicago--that part of the experience definitely does NOT make the Top 11 list. But ask me sometime and I'll tell you some bus stories. The rest of the trip was perfect. We met up with friends who live in the suburbs; we browsed our favorite stores (like the American Girl Store!) and ate at some favorite restaurants (Lou Malnati's!) We saw a Second City mainstage show (Matt's in Second City now, by the way! But he's not a performer yet.) We went to the German street festival. The best part of the trip was a totally spontaneous moment. While walking along Michigan Avenue with our friends, we spotted the old Allerton Hotel. All six of us have been wanting for years, we discovered, to see the top floor of the Allerton--it used to be a club called the Tip Top Tap. So we marched inside like we knew what we were doing, squeezed into the antique elevator (antique = tiny), rode up to the 23rd floor... and found, instead of a bar or club, the most beautiful ballroom! So simple and random and fun!
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| The Allerton Hotel |
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| Inside the Tip Top Tap |
I love my friends that I work with. I am so blessed to have such amazing and fun and wonderful colleagues! This year we started a tradition of "mystery nights." One person plans a night and extends a cryptic invitation (usually including instructions on what to wear or bring). The rest of us just show up--and fun things happen! Our first mystery night was a potluck dinner, followed by laser tag, and then a dip in the pool. We even had a Mystery Machine to ride in! (It pays to have friends with minivans.) Our second mystery night, which I co-planned, was a trip to the haunted corn maze and El Porton. Hopefully this tradition will continue into 2012!
8. Camping at Chubb Hollow
I've mentioned this before, but my Girl Scout troop used to camp at Embassy Suites. No joke. Despite my reputation as an "indoor girl," when my friends suggested we go camping over spring break, I agreed to go. Technically, we weren't really camping, in the full sense of the word. We rented teeny-tiny rustic cabins in the Ozarks. Tiny. Rustic. I just wanted to emphasize that again. I shared a cabin with my friend Sarah and her little girl. We took turns sleeping on the futon beside the fireplace--it got so cold in there at night! Sarah perfected her fire-stoking skills while we were there. During the day, we spent lots of time sitting around the fire pit. Come to think of it, we did that at night too. But also during the day we went canoeing and fishing and hiking. We played kickball and discovered a playground and crawled around in some caves and rocky slopes around the beautiful natural springs. We even found a place where we could watch Tiger basketball (hey, we couldn't be rustic and nature-y all the time.) I wrote a little bit about our camping trip here--it's mostly about the afternoon that my friend Jessica and I veered away from the group and ended up on an epic, seemingly endless hike through some really steep Ozark hills. I love an unexpected adventure! I think it shows tremendous growth (just overall life growth) that my camping trip made it onto my Top 11 list!
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| This is my favorite photo from that trip. I don't know why. |
9. Participating in a flash mob
Once again, my clever coworkers made the list! Every year at our school talent show, the faculty perform a song and dance. This year we spread the word that we were too busy to plan anything... and then we surprised everyone with some flash mob-style glow stick dancing! I tracked the video down on Facebook earlier... Not sure how cool the glow stick dancing actually looked, but it was SO much fun participating in it! Here's the video!
10. Rediscovering my sewing machine and glue gun
I have been focusing this year on awakening my crafty soul... I set a goal to make all of my Christmas gifts, and I accomplished that goal! I relearned all of the sewing skills that I haven't used since high school. I started by making purses out of TOMS flags, and I recently sewed a dress! I learned how to make yarn wreaths and paper roses. I learned how to etch glass and make a photo mat out of felt. I made jewelry for an auction at church and more jewelry for Christmas gifts. I refinished furniture for my classroom and "upcycled" some old sweaters into Christmas decorations. I painted artwork for my walls. I led a group of second graders in a paint party (never thought I'd be able to do that!) I rediscovered the pain that comes with accidentally sticking my finger in a blob of hot glue. And today I made my first melted crayon art! Most importantly, I relearned what joy comes from working with my hands and creating things that I love. Everything that I have painted and glued and sewed this year is a reflection of who I am and the things and people I love. I'm looking forward to learning new skills and working joyfully with my hands in 2012 as well!
11. Being a fifth-year Element volunteer
If the events in this list were in order of importance, this would be at the top. The absolute best, most influential, most spiritually fulfilling experiences I've had in 2011 have come as a result of volunteering with the youth group at GUMC. If any of you awesome youth are reading this, I hope you know just how much you influence our lives as adult volunteers. You encouraged me to attend Emmaus. You challenged and inspired me at Discovery Weekend, SOS, and Crave. I always look forward to learning and growing and worshiping with you all on Sunday nights. I love you all, and I pray for you constantly. In addition to these amazing young people who have become such an important part of my life, volunteering with the youth has resulted in some amazing friendships with the other adult volunteers and our youth ministry staff. Friends, you all are my story editors, my Dream Team. I love you all, and I am thankful for your presence and influence in my life every single day.
I am stopping at eleven events, mostly because the "Top 11 of '11" sounds cool, but also because I've been working on this list for quite a while and I'm exhausted. I want to add so many more things: the Arcade Fire concert I attended with my brother; the wonderful Christmas I just shared with my family; the random weekend trip to St. Louis that I chaperoned with Butler; meeting new people like my sweet friend Fiona. I wanted number 11 to be "watching Jason shave his beard," but that hasn't happened yet. I'm looking forward to putting that at the top of my "Top 12 of '12" list a year from now :)
Pretty much, it's been an awesome year. I am beyond blessed, and writing this list has helped me to realize that a little more. I have incredible friends and an amazing family. I am so thankful and so undeserving!
I am so looking forward to seeing what 2012 will bring. I feel a year of changes coming on! Maybe I'll actually learn how to play the guitar. Maybe I'll be brave and go to SIFAT this summer. Maybe I'll move out of Collierville. Maybe I'll face my fears and kill a spider! Nope, I went too far. That last one's not gonna happen. Whatever comes my way, I'm bidding adieu to 2011 and welcoming in 2012 with a spirit of excitement and hopefulness. Happy new year to you all! May 2012 be a year of blessings and peace for you :)
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