ALY ALLEN | THE BLOG

i'll be honest. that title is a bit misleading because i wouldn't actually know how to throw a party without stressing out. so i won't have any nuggets there, but i'll tell you what happened on Wednesday when we hosted our extended family for Halloween & trick-or-treating. both my husband and i are procrastinators. not a good combo. i had already bought all the "decorations" and food that i needed, but everything else was left until Wednesday. Reese goes to preschool Wednesday so i figured it'd be no problem to get everything done. except that she's the easy one. the baby decided she wasn't going to nap so i strapped her into the carseat and drove around the block a few times. she totally fell asleep, transferred perfectly... and woke up twenty minutes later . screaming and needing me to hold her. the only thing i got accomplished during that nap? writing an email. completely unrelated to the party or anything else relevant. so she was ...

so true, right? not just "materials", but speakers, churches, friends, practices, etc. this quote is from Beth Moore's "Mercy Triumphs" study on James, and she goes on to warn how we can get to the point where we've created our own theology, instead of learning what God has already determined and set forth in His Word and following that. it got me thinking: when we practice this kind of second-hand, "selective" Christianity, we run the very real danger of creating God in our own image , too.  i used to be this person. i believed in a God who i thought was the God of the Bible. i held to a belief system that i thought was based on Biblical principles, and i lived a life that reflected all of this. as a result, i also practiced strongholds that were a consequence of this mess i didn't even realize i had made. after years of picking & choosing and dealing with the consequences, i've learned that the Truth of the Word of Go...

did you all know i have a degree in history? i haven't exactly used it for anything, but i did earn it just the same. one of the major requirements for this degree were two huge research papers that spanned an entire semester each. for the first paper, we were required to choose a topic and then read as many secondary resources as we possibly could on the subject. secondary resources are basically books written by historians who have researched and learned about the topic, and then written a book about it. it's their synthesis and interpretation of their research.  the second paper required that we choose a topic and research all of the primary sources that we could find. we could throw in some secondary resources too, but the main objective was for us to actually practice being a historian ourselves. i wrote my paper on the development of the city of Coronado, see that fancy photo below? sounds fascinating, right? i basically lived in the Coronado library and his...

there's nothing quite like a rainy morning. we always open up the window and listen to the rain and lay in bed a little bit longer. the cool air and the smell. mmmmm the smell of rain. it just smells fresh and new and promising. plus it signals that fall is finally letting her guard down for us. i do love the rain, but sometimes it's a bummer when it rains on your pumpkin patch plans [say that ten times fast]. that's what happened yesterday. we'd planned for a few weeks to head up to the pumpkin patch with some friends, but the minute we woke up, it was rainy and the forecast said rain all day long. we'd been looking forward to it, but i was not excited about the prospects of wetness and muddiness with the kids, so we decided not to go. i was bummed, not because i needed to go to the pumpkin patch so badly, but because i crave quality family time. something other than sitting around the house, since that's what we do most of the week. i always feel ...

right this very second in my heart i want to just reach out and touch God. i feel like maybe i could if i tried really hard. i feel like i might explode from His goodness to me. i'm sitting in starbucks and my mom has had the kids all day, and will have them all night. and my husband is out of town. so i am literally alone and it is heaven on earth in every sense of that phrase. i love being alone. i love being refreshed. i love solitude. today i also got to sing at my "old" church . i'll just say it felt good. i felt alive for the first time in a loooong time. worshiping God. after nine months off, it was nice to know i could still sing. but it was even better to just worship. to remember that God is always worthy to be praised. it had been a dry nine months, meaning that i hadn't really "experienced" or "felt" God in [musical] worship for awhile. and though i know that many aspects of my life have been poured out in worship over those nine...

simply buy two prints, and in the message section at checkout,  let me know what you chose for your 3rd free print. it's that simple! enjoy! shop here

so i kinda touched on my college experience in this post. and i started thinking about how different that might seem to some people. not going away to school. not having that typical "college experience". not meeting my husband there, not living in dorms or going to football games or doing whatever you do when you're in college, because i guess i wouldn't really know. looking back, i don't regret this decision, but i'll admit at the time it was weird. i've always kept to myself,  been slow to meet new people, impossibly fearful of striking up conversation with strangers. so i just drove there, went to class, minded my own business, barely joined in class discussion, turned in my work, and that's about it. half-way through college, my husband and i got married. that was a very weird feeling. you're in this place where everyone is your age and they're all care-free and dating and breaking up and going about their day as a normal college stud...