Sayin' Goodbye to a childhood friend

I am at Chelsea's house right now saying goodbye to her because she is leaving on a mission this week to Rome, Italy. Chelsea was probably the first girl that I became friends with..haha. It all started in sunbeams. Anyways, its just really cool that she decided to serve a mission. Rome, Italy would be such an awesome place to serve. Being here and saying goodbye just reminds me about how I felt when I was in her position... It really starts to hit you that you are leaving when you say goodbye to people and realize you won't be seeing them again for two years. Also, my old friend Sam Casaday is here because he was also in my ward when we were really young. I love Sammy C! He's a funny kid. Sam and I have a lot of good memories together... alot of inside jokes. I'm sad that I don't see him much anymore. I'm just looking at him right now and all I can say is WOW. What a guy! Probably the lamest thing we ever did was sit outside of David Willardson's house for 6 hours waiting for him to get home.... We had NOTHING better to do. We just sat on the porch and ate soda crackers. Ok I'm done with this blog!

The greatest blessing in my life!

I am ashamed that this wasn't the very first thing I blogged about because this is the very most important thing to me in my life!! On Christmas day, after years of anticipation, I asked my high school sweetheart, Jenna Christensen, to marry me! It all started back in 8th grade... Jenna and I were in the same science class and became friends there. It wasn't until our sophomore year though that we told one another that we liked each other, and since then we've pretty much always been together and I have just anxiously awaited the day when I would finally get the chance to ask her to marry me.
Jenna is amazing! She is the sweetest, nicest, most sincere and loving person you'll ever meet. I am so grateful and feel so lucky that I get to spend the rest of my life with her. She has such a special ability to love people and help them feel loved. She is always considerate of others' feelings and makes a conscious effort to ensure that nobody is feeling left out. She has an incredible gift with people with special needs to be able to love them and understand them. It really is an inspiring sight to see her when she interacts with her friends with special needs. She just has this way of looking right past their disability and straight into their heart and is able to communicate with them in a way that most of us can't. She lives her life in such a christ-like manner; her testimony is expressed so strongly through her actions and just the way she has chosen to live her life. She understands her divine worth as a daughter of God and is able to see everyone in that same light and treats them as such. She never judges or speaks bad of others either. I love her so much for who she is and for the example she is to me. She is going to continue to do so many amazing things in this life and be a blessing to so many people.
I will share a story about something that just explains the kind of person Jenna is and why I loved her so much, even when I was 15. From 9th-11th grade, I suffered from some sever acne. It took me a few cycles of Accutane to finally overcome the problem, but I had to deal with it for a couple years first. This was a pretty tough time for me in terms of self-confidence and self-esteem. I knew I had bad acne and I knew that other people noticed it, and sometimes I got made fun of at school because of it. When my acne was at its worst was when Jenna started liking me. I was really confused...I always thought to myself "Why would she like me? My face is so gross to look at..." But I noticed something with Jenna that was different than everyone else. One thing I couldn't do while I had acne was look people in the eye when I would talk to them. I would see their eyes looking at my acne instead of back into my eyes and it just reminded me of how bad my acne was that people couldn't help but stare at when they would talk to me. So I would usually not look at people directly when I would talk to them just so I could avoid all that. Well, I noticed that with Jenna that when she would talk to me she would look ONLY into my eyes and never at my acne. Not once! And that's when I knew that she liked me for who I was and not for how I looked (obviously). Luckily my acne is gone now, but I learned so much about the kind of person Jenna was and the kind of heart she has from this experience. She looks past the outer layer in people and sees them all as children of God and treats them like it. I've never heard her say one negative thing about another person or ever use degrading language. She really understands her purpose here on the earth and finds the beauty in everything. She is so humble and full of gratitude for what she has and never complains about the trials she is faced with. She has blessed my life so much and has taught me so much about how to love other people.

Thursday's Hero

For my blog entry today I am going to write about my experience with the Thursday's Hero program that I help out with here at BYU. Thursday's Hero is a program that Coach Mendenhall introduced a few years back as a way to give back to the community. My job is to select the hero each week from the list of nominees and host the event, which includes giving the family a tour of the football facilities and introducing them to the team. It has been an awesome privilege to be able to meet the people we select each week and it's a very humbling experience to read through all of the nominations that are emailed to me and read of the challenges and adversity that these people are facing. It's hard having to select so few people from such a long list! I always look forward to Thursdays when I get to actually meet the hero in person because they are such amazing people. This year has seen quite a variety of adversity among the heroes... From people with special needs to people with cancer, to people who just recently lost their husband and father, to ordinary people who have suffered horrible accidents, they all exemplify faith, hope, determination, and love, and deserve to be recognized for their efforts. Being honored by Coach Mendenhall and his team is considered the greatest honor every by so many of the heroes and it's really neat to observe the team as they interact with the families and to see the time that Coach Mendenhall dedicates to this program. I am so grateful to have been assigned to coordinate this program; it's a very rewarding feeling for me to feel like I'm helping brighten someone's day. BYU's just awesome...

I'm a blogger!

Alright! I''m officially a blogger! It's time for me to see if blogging is something I will develop a passion for like many of my friends and family. As part of my MCOM 320 class we are required to create a blog and post a new entry once a week so to all of my followers out there, I will try not to disappoint! ;) I will try and mix things up and write about a variety of topics and maybe impress and and inspire you with a poem or two throughout the semester. If, by the end of this semester, I have more followers than just Aubrey and McKay (my little brother and sister) I will be pleasantly surprised. But we will see... maybe I will write a poem or come up with an idea or something that just becomes way famous! This blog could very well be the beginning of something great. I'm trying to be enthusiastic about my first blog, but I'm hoping that I will get better, more creative, and excited to write in my blog as time goes on. But for now, I'm finished because I've met all the requirements for the assignment so far. :)