Delightfully Enlightened

           I feel like this topic is a little touchy just because everyone has a different opinion and many people could be offended. There was a black woman in Hobby Lobby looking around and spotted some decorations that looked like raw cotton. She was very offended and said that it was racist and it was a symbol for slavery. In my personal opinion this lady is completely wrong, there is no difference between a black man and a white man except the amount of melanin in their skin. Melanin was developed because our early ancestors lived in hot humid areas which caused them to develop more sweat glands and more melanin was released and therefore their skin got darker. There is only one race and that is the human race and there is no difference between people who are black or white we are all the same people. The cotton in Hobby Lobby was not meant to offend anyone and slavery wasn't just African Americans picking cotton, it was many other things too like pl...

Stressed? Me too. Photo Credit: studygram via tumblr.com My to-do list for school seems never ending. And if I'm lucky enough to find myself away from academic to-dos, I find myself faced with a new stress. Like staring at a pile of laundry that probably weighs more than I do, that I could wash. But then who knows how long it'd be left in the washing machine to wrinkle and grow mold? Ew. My point is that I am extremely   s t r e s s e d. And I have a slight inkling that I'm not alone... So, what do you do when you have too many to-dos? I have a few ideas for my fellow stress-freaks. 1. Pray.  It's very easy to look at a gigantic to-do list and be overwhelmed. But God is bigger than every to-do on that list (yes, Amy, including the ACT). He is also overwhelmingly generous with His peace. Isaiah 26:3 says, "You will keep in perfect peace all who trust in you, all whose thoughts are fixed upon you." So, whe...

Photo Credit: Pete Amachree If you could time travel to one point in the past or future, what time would you go to? When this prompt was given to my blogging class for our blog carnival, my mind immediately jolted to a period in history I've always been fascinated with: the 1920s. The 1920s highlight the pitfall of the human heart: greed. These years depict what happens when we allow gluttony to dictate our lives. During this time, everyone gravitated to an need for instantaneous gratification, elevating themselves at the expense of others. The selfishness of the human heart was exemplified, not just on a national level, but a universal level. That's the part that boggles my mind-- the extreme greed during this time wasn't limited to one group of people, but became a universal social norm. I think it would be interesting to go back in time and watch as humanity went through this period. How did we reach this peak of depravity on such a large scale? Wha...

"Our world needs kindness more than ever right now and without change, destruction will continue to ensue. Take the vital lessons from this situ ation and push yourself to be better. Life can sadly be taken very easily and because of this you should reach out with compassion to your loved ones and live beautifully while you still have the opportunity to." ~Bridget Lynn This past weekend, my hometown became the landmark of the biggest massacre in United States history. That statement, in and of itself, is hard for me to say. See, Vegas itself was never the victim. Growing up there, I watched the news cover the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut on December 14, 2012. I heard about the Boston Marathon bombings of April 13, 2013. And I read articles about the 2015 San Bernardino attack. But, for all of those events, life went on. Because, for many of us, we are taught that life goes on. But life shouldn't go on. For me, this massacr...

This past weekend, I attended a youth retreat and the speaker made a joke about how every girl has about seven "best friends". He then proceeded to say that this makes no sense because you can't have seven friends who are the best. This got me thinking: why do we call it a best friend? The term "best friend" could potentially create a lot of unnecessary competition. What do you do if one best friend get's jealous of another? Or wants to be the only one? Not that some girls don't do that anyways, but why encourage this competitiveness with such an exclusive term? Now don't get me wrong, I am 100% guilty of using the term "best friend". In fact, I probably overuse the term. However, I've never used it with the intention of placing one friend in rank over another. So here's my new dilemma: if I'm going to use a term so frequently, what do I mean by it? In other words, what is a "best friend"? Photo Credit: Bridget...

For my first blog post, I thought I'd explore what the title of my blog, delightfully enlightened, means. As you could probably guess, the delightful part comes with the connotation of, well, delight. My hope is that you'll find some form of delight in the words I write on this blog. That brings me to enlightenment. I don't mean the enlightenment era, although there are some pretty fantastic works to be read from that time. Locke was undoubtedly the real MVP of philosophy during that time. Anyways- what's enlightenment? In the context of this blog, enlightenment is very much what it sounds like: to shed light on something. My goal is to open your eyes to new topics and create an environment where you can explore the depths of your mind- if only for the few minutes it takes to read a blog post. That said, I'll leave you with a quote to ponder: "Enlightenment is when a wave realizes it is the ocean." Photo Credit: DebM WAVEART Thoughtfull...