Read Angie's Thoughts

Well, another year has come and gone and I’m still wondering where the time went! God has been faithful beyond anything I have deserved this past year and I have loved watching Him at work. I am teaching 2 nd grade at Trinity Lutheran School for the second year and my class consists of 5 boys. Yep, I said boys! It has been a wonderful experience, completely different from last year’s class but a great adventure in itself. They ask great questions and are always saying or doing something to keep me on my toes! I love the many opportunities I get each day to share Christ with them and bring Him into the classroom. I continue to enjoy working with my co-workers at Trinity, they have become my family over the past 5 years and it’s been such a blessing to be a part of God’s work in that school. Because of my teaching contract, I was able to take this last summer off and not work at all and boy, did I love it! Besides the daily opportunities to sleep in and be as lazy as the day would allow...

In recent weeks, I have been wrestling again with God over the issue of my mom, or rather, my not having a mom. This issue tends to rear its ugly head every now and then, usually when I least expect it. It usually starts with my becoming more aware of the interactions taking place around me between moms and their children. Working at a school, I see a lot of those interactions and lately, watching them has left a familiar pang in my chest. Then comes the heaviness of heart and the tears when I lay in bed at night trying to fall asleep. Along with those tears come the familiar questions I've asked myself since I was a little girl, the biggest one being, "Why didn't she want me?" As I lay in bed last night, having cried until there were no tears left, I began thinking back over the many issues I've dealt with in my life. Between the abuse issues, the mom issues, and all the issues in between, I really have dealt with some difficult ones. What I realized is that even...

Recently, I have followed the suggestions of some close friends and started to write a book about my experiences with sexual abuse and the abandonment by my mom. My first attempt at writing was this past summer, but I didn't have much success. I have a book full of poems that I wrote years ago when going to counseling and really in the middle of working through my abuse issues and my idea was to take each poem and write some background information on what I was dealing with when I wrote it. As hard as I tried, the words just weren't flowing and sitting down to write was such a struggle, so I gave up and stopped trying to force it. A few weeks ago, I was thinking again about how I wanted to use my life and my past experiences to help other people and a new idea of how to write my story came to mind. I decided just to start at the beginning and write how things happened. I started asking people close to me questions about things I didn't know or couldn't remember and just...

Here are a couple of stories from school the past couple of weeks, enjoy!! *Last Friday the kindergarten teacher needed to borrow my overhead projector in the afternoon. So after I used it for my math lesson, I carried it over to the building where her classroom is. I walked holding the projector in my arms and one of the students said, "Oooh, a camera!"  Talk about a big camera!! *Today during math, I got out the play money to use during our lesson. All of my students (all 6 of them boys!) started talking about how much they love money and how wonderful it is. All of a sudden, Ridge pipes up. "You shouldn't love money," he states very matter-of-factly. Now, Ridge is one of the 'leaders' of my class and when he talks, everyone listens. "Why shouldn't we love money?" the others started asking. "Because it's like the devil," he says very pointedly. All the other boys get these strange looks on their faces and ask how money is li...

This is actually a blog I've wanted to write for awhile now but never got around to it. Through recent conversations with a friend and a Bible study I'm doing with another friend, some things have come to the surface and I've decided now is as good a time to do it as any.  It's not an easy thing to put out there, it's about a part of my life that I am ashamed of and would give anything to go back and redo but since I can't, I will spill my guts about it instead! In high school, I was a mean girl. Mean is probably putting it lightly - I was a bully. When I admit that to friends now, they have a hard time believing it but it really is true. Ask any of the 17 classmates I graduated with, as well as under classmen below us and I'm sure most, if not all of them have their own stories to tell of things I said and/or things I did to them. There were a few in particular that I was especially mean to and focused most of my bullying behavior towards. I would talk abou...

I wasn’t raised in an affectionate family. My dad wasn’t affectionate towards me growing up, and even today he’s not an affectionate person. I know he loves me, he shows it many other ways, but just not through physical touch. Not having a mom around didn’t help things either. Moms are traditionally known to be the more affectionate parent and that was clearly lacking in my childhood. Basically it all boils down to the fact that growing up, I was rarely touched in a way that wasn’t abusive at the hands of my grandfather. I often think back to the night I told my dad and step-mom about the abuse. After my grandparents left our house, my grandfather have just admitted that what I was accusing him of was true, my dad said I could go to bed. A little while later, he called me back up and asked me a couple questions to clarify some things I had said, and then I went back downstairs to my bedroom. I can remember feeling such a huge relief that the secret I had been keeping for the past seven...

  '...to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.' ~ Isaiah 61:3 This past weekend, my dad and I spent a day traveling through Yellowstone. I love the park, it is full to the hilt of God's creation and no matter where you are in the park, you're completely surrounded by His handiwork. When my dad and I got home, he was looking at the pictures I had taken with my digital camera. When he came to the picture above, he asked, "What were you taking a picture of here?" I explained to him how much I love to see places in the park that were once devastated by fire, but now green grass and beautiful wildflowers and coming up from the very place that was burned. It reminded me of this verse in the Bible, where God promises to  bring beauty from the painful, broken, and devastating experiences in our lives. It seems God has been really emphasizing this promise ...