Coming to you live from the Miami airport on an 11 hour layover.

I spent the last six weeks preparing to leave my loved ones for a year. As quality time is my number one love language, this looked like a lot of dinner dates, pool days, and long conversations. During this time I was able to connect and make memories to reflect on through this next year. Spending quality time with friends and family fills my heart. Sometimes its not even talking but just having some one to sit with in silence and know they are present.

Well, one morning I sat outside reading in God’s Word and He revealed something to me.

If quality time is how I invest in relationships that are important to me, I also need to invest in my relationship with God (My Heavenly Father) by spending quality time with him. While the relationships with my friends and family were growing, my relationship with God was no longer my number one priority.

I stopped journaling, reading the bible, and talking to Him on a daily basis. I was so busy crunching in time to be with friends and family that I pushed Him to the side.

This realization helped me understand how love languages can affect my spiritual walk as well. You see, I have a thing for love languages. The purpose of love languages are to help improve relationships. They are how we give and receive love. If you are unfamiliar with these, there are five.

In order mine are

1.Quality Time
2.Acts of Service
3.Words of Affirmation
4.Gifts
5.Physical Touch

I enjoy figuring out others, seeing how they affect relationships and making people take the test so I can better understand how they are loved. It fascinates me and I could talk about them for hours.

Fast Forward to Launch

Our squad mentor spoke on how as Christians we have to spend time with Jesus. It should not be a thought but a norm to our everyday. For instance, 17 years she has been saved and 17 years she has journaled…not missing a single day. That my friends is quality time with Jesus.

In order to make space for Jesus, we were challenged to give up social media for the first six weeks of our race. If you know me that is one difficult challenge but oh, how desperately I need it. Not only to focus on community but instead of scrolling through Instagram, taking the perfect selfie for snapchat or thinking of clever tweets I’ll be able to go deeper in the bible. I’ll be able to journal with Jesus and make it a routine so that I am practicing my love language with our Heavenly Father.

Last State Side Blog.

I’ll arrive in Albania at 2:00pm EST tomorrow, August 8th, 2017.

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