Blog-tember Challenge | What Are You Passionate About?

It’s Friday!! Hooray!! 🙂 Here’s how we personally are feeling about today:

How has your week been? It’s been a full, busy one around here. Bjorn and I just started our back-to-school teacher training and workshops this week, which is a pretty big adjustment compared to our summer schedule! It can be a bit overwhelming to dive right into meetings with teachers, mapping out goals, finding resources, attending trainings…but it’s all good things, and I know we will grow accustomed to our new schedule just like we do every year. 🙂

Another fun thing about this week is that it’s the start of the 2015 Blog-tember Challenge on Brave Love Blog! This challenge is a wonderful, fresh way to get us all writing together and learning more about each other! I’ll be joining in as I can throughout September. I started with this post for Day One, if you want to catch up with some fun FAQ!

Today’s prompt is: What are you passionate about?

There are a few major things that spring to mind for me.

1 // Truth. It’s a hard one to describe, but basically, I’m passionate about things being represented the way they really are! I took a spiritual gifts test through church recently, and my scores showed that my top “gift” is discernment – essentially being able to tell if something rings true in a given situation. I suppose that explains why I get so frustrated when I see truth being misrepresented and always feel like I need to speak up (even on things that aren’t necessarily my business, haha)! And here I always thought it was a first-born thing. 😉 To be honest, I’m still figuring out how I can specifically use this passionate trait in my life, besides learning to step up and say something when I need to defend what’s honest and right.

2 // Cultivating a true HOME. I am so passionate about keeping a home that becomes the heart of our life together. I am passionate about establishing practical systems for living a more organized life. I’m passionate about cleaning. I’m passionate about attentive, hearty, gather-around-the-table kinds of meals with friends and family. I’m passionate about hosting overnight guests, or simply making guests in our home feel welcome and comfortable! I want people – regardless of whether or not they’re in the family – to feel like Wow, that is a true sense of HOME, when they leave our place. And I love being intentional about all of this stuff before kids even enter the picture. I believe it’s important to create that sense of a “family home” even when it is just the two of us. Speaking of that…

3 // Kids! I so look forward to being a mom someday but for now I am still living out this passion by utilizing my college degree as an elementary teacher. I feel that teachers have such a unique role and opportunity to affect many children positively! Some stories, we’ll never know. But we can rest assured as teachers that we lovingly, competently reached out and helped every single child who was placed in our path that day.

4 // The human experience. The idea that we’re all in this together – yet we each have such a deep, beautiful, raw story building in our individual lives. Seriously, the whole concept gives me goosebumps. I had a book called Children Just Like Me when I was little, and I remember being just blown away with the idea that all around the world, there were kids just like me with similar hopes, dreams, fears, siblings, schoolwork…but at the same time, these kids lived such uniquely different lives from me! It was fascinating and still is! That’s a huge piece of why I love blogging and love reading others’ stories so much! I believe that blogging allows us to truly “enter into” each other’s lives – the highs, the lows, the struggles, the joys. It’s a beautiful thing.

5 // Marriage. If you’ve read along for any length of time, you know that my husband Bjorn and my marriage are incredibly important to me, and that it is a topic I love thinking and talking about! Marriage is a huge, beautiful commitment and I have been so grateful for it. At the same time, I am continuously looking for ways to further bless my husband, approach marriage with a better attitude, and serve God with our marriage. I’ve got a whole “Marriage” category at the top of this page, if you’re interested, too!

Well, there you have it! I’m sure I could think of many other things I’m passionate about (like iced vanilla chai, for example!) but I’ll leave you with these five for today. Have a very happy, relaxing Labor Day weekend, friends!

But, two quick things before you go –

1 // What are you passionate about?? Let me know! I can’t wait to hear! 🙂

2 //  I’ve got an amazing deal going on over at my Etsy shop right now!! You can get 50% off any of my prints with the code SEPTEMBER50 🙂