It's been a while...

So for various reasons I have not been able to update my blog, and I apologize.  A huge pet peeve of mine is people that don't follow through with a commitment.  So I will try to do better...

In light of this new commitment I have a whole new post, so here goes:

If you would have told me a year ago that I would spend an entire weekend at an event, without an ounce of studying I would have laughed.  For my whole first year here at Ross University I did nothing but study, rarely went to any social events and only saw the beach from campus or my apartment window.  I would have had an anxiety attack at the thought of spending an ENTIRE day not doing school work.  However, this weekend was a life changing experience.  But let's backup for a second.

Throughout my time here at Ross I have become increasingly involved with "extracurricular activities".  For my second and third semesters I was a part of the Women's Bible Study and last semester I finally joined some of the clubs, did 2 Bible Studies, and worked as a research assistant with the on campus donkeys.  The clubs here are so active with events going on every week; students are so involved!  I have definitely become one of those types of students.  Thankfully, I (at least at this moment in time) have somewhat gotten over my fear of failure and started to enjoy island life, being a student again, and investing in relationships.

This weekend's event was called Real Life Real Impact, sponsored by Christian Veterinary Missions and Nutramax, and brought by Christian Veterinary Fellowship.  This weekend seminar is a spiritual retreat geared toward veterinary students.  During these weekends, students have an opportunity to meet other Christian veterinarians in private practice, talk with some of CVM's long-term missionaries and find out about short-term mission trips.  I got the pleasure of helping to plan this event and have been working hard along with a faculty advisor to plan  It has been such a great learning experience; working through frustrations and changes of plans is NOT my forte, so learning to "let it go" was a skill to be honed.

Here was the brochure that
my marketing team made:

The flier to post on campus***
(more on this a little later):

This was the schedule of events for the weekend:

It was a great weekend for me to learn about the Short-term mission trip that I have planned for August (more on this later) and also a great opportunity to hear about Long-term missions (stay tuned for more on this).  It was amazing to hear that close to 4,000 veterinarians from the US are a part of Christian Veterinary Missions in some capacity.  This is truly where I feel my passion lies; how or if it works out the way I want is yet to be determined.  But just as Kathy Shoenborn mentioned in her talk, God shows us one step at a time where our life is leading.  If we could see the end result - the result 20 steps down the road - we would not learn nearly as much; learning about ourselves and, more importantly, about our relationship with God is what this journey is all about!

Since I have done such a horrible job of keeping this updated, I would like to retroactively update so everyone can fill in the time gap.  It will be a process, but I am committed!  Hopefully I'll have another update before the end of the week.