Starting Out

I'm quite new to this, so bear with me. This blog is more for me than for my readers (if I have any), so take a look if you're ever bored out of your mind. That's probably the only time it will seem acceptable. ;) On the other hand, I'm not saying that since I'm doing this for me, I don't want other people involved; I do. That's what blogs are for, right? :D

So why am I blogging, exactly? That's a good question. I'm actually quite excited to be starting this thing. It's uncharted territory for me, an adventure, and a small step out of my safety bubble. I'm naturally an introvert, so I usually don't talk about myself unless I'm 1) asked a direct question or 2) just trying to make small talk. I don't know where this will go or even if it will go anywhere. Who knows? Maybe I'll be good at it.

So what's in the name? I've been trying to come up with a display name and blog name since...7 o'clock PM. It is now 11:11 PM. I'm not a very creative person, so I mooch off of other people's creativity if you don't mind. Let's start with the username. I was playing off of the whole Tom Marvolo Riddle=Lord Voldemort idea (Yay Harry Potter!). I used a randomizer to scramble all the letters of my full name until I came up with something slightly acceptable. In the end, it turned into Sir Henry V. Osen-Beate. No, I am not from the Middle Ages, nor am I a man. I'm a teenage girl in the twenty-first century, thank you. Now the name of my blog - "Before the Difficult Days Come..." This is a direct quote from my Father found in Ecclesiastes 12:1: "Remember now your Creator in the days of your youth, before the difficult days come, and the years draw near when you say, 'I have no pleasure in them.'" I chose to use this as the name of my blog because that's where I am now. I am in my youth, which is "before the difficult days come" whether I feel like that now or not.

I would like to briefly discuss this verse. I know many fellow Christians who did not know the gospel before they were adults, and I hear that it is very, very hard to break habits that one grew up with. They could not have remembered their Creator in the days of their youth to help them later in life if they did not even acknowledge Him. I am so blessed to have grown up in a Christian household with a faithful congregation to attend for the past 17 years. Still others who have grown up in the Lord's Church did not have faithful Christian friends their age to just be something to fall back on that understands their struggles as a Christian. I have also been blessed here with more than one amazing and godly friend. Christians are my best friends because they know what I mean when, on a hot summer day, I say something like, "I wish I could go to the beach, but alas, I can't." If I say that to anyone else in the world they would encourage me to go to the beach, not seeing why I can't, and that only makes it harder to resist. A Christian friend is worth more to me than any material possession. It is they that lead me closer to Christ and fight with me in the spiritual battle that is constantly taking place. The thing I will miss most when I go to college in a year is my church family. The thing that gives me the most comfort, though, is the assurance that I will still have the same God with me when I leave; the same God that put Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and told Noah how to build the ark and made Joseph second in command in Egypt and wrote the words of the same Bible I read today.

One of the most amazing things to me is my significance in God's eyes as compared to my significance in the world. Kierra and I talked about this on the beach at about 11 PM one night. There are 6 billion, give or take, people on this planet. And how big is this planet? 13,000 times smaller than Jupiter and 1,300,000 times smaller than our sun. Yet we see this earth as so huge. But the sun is ginormous, right? Not comparatively. Our solar system is one of many in this galaxy, which is one of many, many galaxies. Instead of listening to me talk, just look at the pictures below. A picture speaks a thousand words, eh? Anyways, my point was that I am such a teeny tiny bit of everything that God created, yet he is my personal God. He allows me to speak to Him through Christ in prayer. I can talk to the person who created all of that. Picture a quark, then an atom, then a molecule, and an organ, a single person, a family, a country, a continent, this planet. Now picture the solar system as you've seen it in textbooks and diagrams. Then picture the next level: the whole galaxy, billions of solar systems. Next comes theuniverse...billions of galaxies that contain billions of everything else previously listed. We hear these numbers all the time, but stop now to really think about how vast those numbers truly are. When there are 100 people in one place, we say it's crowded. What if there were 1,000,000,000 people in one place? They would still be invisible from the perspective of the entire universe. The more I learn, the more I realize I don't know.

Ok, so I had trouble putting the pictures in how I wanted them. Please help me; I'm technologically challenged. :P That last one is a picture of lots of different galaxies. See how many there are? And that's not even all of them! Pretty cool stuff. Or maybe I'm just a nerd. Either way, God is amazing!

I need you to give me feedback. I didn't expect this post to be this long. Too long? Not too long? Font size too big or small? Any other pointers? Let me know, thanks. It also took me far too long for this first one. I'll have to work on it and hopefully get better. I'm sorry if this was dreadfully boring. I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. I was going to write about the job interview I had today and how I got in my first car accident ever, but that'll have to wait till the next posting. Looking forward to it.

Live long and prosper. G'night.

~Bef