8 million mosquitos can't be wrong...

I entered college as a nursing major.  My aspirations of being a nurse and saving hundreds lives in my boldly printed scrubs lasted exactly 6 weeks.  What broke me?  Needles and blood.

Needless to say, because of my fear of these two things that sent me running from nursing to literally any other major, I have never had a strong interest in giving blood.  When blood drive sign ups would roll around, I would recite my lame go-to excuses ("I went to Mexico," "I'm probably anemic," "My blood is...uh...weird, so I don't think they'd want it," etc.) as I ran away as fast as possible.

And as if my fear of blood and needles wasn’t enough to keep me away from the nearest blood drive, the nightmarish stories of people’s horrible experiences with giving blood certainly did the trick:

“Oh yeah, Danielle, it was awful.  I got there and whole place smelled like blood.  I waited in line forever, my dread growing every second.  I thought they had ripped the tip of my finger off when they did the finger prick.  I seriously think the blade hit the bone.  Then I had an allergic reaction to the iodine the nurse wiped on my arm, and my whole arm went numb.  And after she stuck me 10 times in each arm, I passed out when I saw my blood go into the bag.  Then when I came to, I threw up all over the nurse, right in front of the really cute guy in the next chair.  Then I sat there for 20 minutes while my blood slowly filled up the bag.  I seriously thought I would die in the chair.  After I was done, I went to go get the free snacks, and they were out of water, and the cookie I ate was hard as a rock.  Then I passed out again.”

Hmmm...I'll be sure to put that on my "to-don't" list...

But with encouragement from a friend who assured me that the pain level was not akin to that of having your arm chopped off with a hack saw like I had previously believed, I decided to face my fears and donate blood.  And I’m so glad that I did!

It was a really great experience.  The nurses were really funny and stuck me on the first try.  I never even came close to passing out.  I had a good laugh when I heard a little boy tell the man donating next to me that his blood looked like BBQ sauce.  Yes, the room smelled like blood and the finger prick hurt, but my arm is still attached to my body, which is more than I expected.

But what I wasn’t expecting was to save three lives today!  In my mind-consuming fear of the blood and needles, I didn't have the brain capacity to remember that by giving blood I get to give life to someone who might have lost his or her life without my donation.  I think that’s worth a finger prick.

So here’s to trying new things, saving three lives, friends that encourage you to face your fears, and eating free peanut butter brownies made by the sweet old ladies who volunteer for the Red Cross!

To learn more about donating blood, visit redcrossblood.org.

Let the blogging begin!

I have realized something over the past few months—I’m getting old.  Or older, at least. 

An 8-year-old girl at my church was telling me all about the new Justin Bieber movie.  I told her that I wish they would have made an N*Sync movie when I was her age.  Her blank stare indicated that she had never even heard of N*Sync—are you kidding me?

I cited a source from 2004 in a paper, and my professor told me I couldn’t use it because it was outdated.  I started high school in 2004.

We had two snow days in a row this semester, the first snow days at Truman in 37 years.  I didn’t even feel slightly compelled to build a fort or make the trek to the nearest sledding hill, makeshift cafeteria-tray-turned-sled in hand.

The other day, I used the phrase, “Back in the day” to refer to something that happened in my own life.

And…

I’m starting a blog.

Blogs are for people with important things to share, people with lives.  News about family, professional opinions, recipes, pearls of wisdom—these are the things that people blog about.  I can’t possibly be old enough to have anything of worth to write about, right?

Well, posts with pictures of kids or delicious dinner ideas will be in short supply, but I think that I’ll have a lot to share with you in the coming months.  As I inch closer to graduation in December, I am realizing how many changes, challenges, and blessings God will bring into my life this year.

As the last year of college begins, I know that many opportunities will come my way.  The choices I make will take me down one of two paths.  One path is wide and worn.  It leads to the illusive “American Dream.”  This is the path where all my talents will be recognized, where all my hard work will pay off, where I will get all the credit for my accomplishments.

The other path, much narrower than the first, is one that requires its travelers to embrace radical abandonment to the person and purpose of Jesus Christ.  This is the path where my talents are given to me in order to inspire others to glorify the Lord, where hard work plays second fiddle to the power of the Holy Spirit, and where God is recognized as the giver of every good gift in my life.

The path I choose will determine my response to lots of questions that I must answer in the next year.  Which job will I take?  What city will I live in?  How will I spend my money?  What friends will I have?  Where will I serve?  What will consume my time?  These decisions are coming, and I want each choice to glorify the Lord.

In his book, Radical, David Platt poses this question:  “What if God in all his grace is radically committed to showing himself strong on behalf of a people who express their need for him so their lives might make much of him?”

Platt goes on to say, “God delights in using ordinary Christians who come to the end of themselves and choose to trust in his extraordinary provision.  He stands ready to allocate his power to all who are radically dependent on him and radically devoted to making much of him.”

Radical dependence and radical devotion—that is what the Lord wants from me.

Already the Lord is causing me to stretch and grow as he molds me into the woman he wants me to be.  I’m a planner by nature.  I like to set goals, and I have long been dreaming and making goals about the phase of life I am about to enter into.

But over the last few months, God has been exposing my goals for what they are—altars to myself.  My dreams for my life were things that I could accomplish in my own power.  They were risk-free and disappointment-proof.  My goals were safe, and that’s a problem because my God is daring.

He is changing my dreams and making them reflect his own dreams for his Kingdom.  He is expanding what I thought was possible as he reveals the power of his Spirit.  I’m excited about the direction he is taking me, even if the changes are uncomfortable or unpredictable at times.  But if that is what it takes for me to discover the character of God and become more like his Son, then I’m all in.  I wait in eager anticipation to see what God will do in me and through me in 2011.