"Ohana means family and family means nobody ever gets left behind or forgotten."
~ Lilo & Stitch
This week was packed scary full of lectures and readings and driving and registering and writing and sleeping and coffee.
Along with the excitement of {finally} getting in our skills lab and starting our public health nursing clinical rotation, I registered for my next {and last} semester of classes.
The challenges which were presented to me very early on into this year put my academic plans into jeopardy.
What if your plans are not God's plans for your life?
It took me quite some time to act on my understanding that fighting against reality is a victory-less fight. I chose to surrender my plans to the Lord because there was nothing else I could do, and even then, I was thoroughly reluctant to do so. Nevertheless, once I surrendered, a peace came over me, a similar feeling to what I have only felt once before, and the mountains began to move. In my weakness, His strength carried me.
God has blessed me with these mountainous challenges. They have pushed me past my limits and opened my eyes to what can happen when you choose to be determined no matter how many people tell you otherwise.
So here's to the challenges that push us over the edge, show us what God is made of, and make us who we are.
It's funny how when you decide to give up control, things start swinging your way. When you surrender control, you actually become powerful. Why with God everything always seems so backwards? Maybe we are actually the backwards ones.
In other news {not as exciting as registering for the last and most thrilling semester of my undergraduate nursing-student career}, this week we dove into our community health nursing clinical. Now public health nursing is much different that pretty much everything we have done so far.
Public health nursing involve the following three duties:
(1) assessment {of the community},
(2) policy development {to promote a healthy community}, and
(3) assurance {of needed health services}.
The duties of a public health nurse differ greatly compared to that of, lets say, and ICU or ED nurse.
For our clinical we have a group project, otherwise known as the Community Assessment Project. And if you know anything about the world of nursing, you know that in following the nursing process, the action of assessment always comes first.
Assessing the community takes a lot of work, more so than I had originally assumed. There are so many aspects of the community that needs assessing; from roads to houses to community hangout spots - anything that can affect health, which is practically anything and everything.
This past week was Windshield Survey time - and it is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. So I rode with a clinical-mate/class-mate/bff/nursing-fam-member and we assessed our designated areas of the Columbus County community from the inside of the car.
However, because many areas of this county was hit pretty hard by Hurricane Matthew, we couldn't just stay in the car - there were a lot of things we had to get out and assess. I definitely felt like a crime scene investigator, even though the crime scene was absent and I am not going to school to be any type of investigator.
I took many pictures of the residual damage of the storm to parts of the County, however, it didn't really hit me until I went back later that day and compared them to the pictures that were taken at the peak of the flood waters. It was absolutely breathtaking, knowing that where I stood Thursday morning was completely underwater about two weeks ago.
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Matthew 8:26
And he said to them, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” Then he rose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm.
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Isaiah 25:4
For you have been a stronghold to the poor, a stronghold to the needy in his distress, a shelter from the storm and a shade from the heat;
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Psalm 89:8-9
Who is like you, Lord God Almighty? You, Lord, are mighty, and your faithfulness surrounds you.You rule over the surging sea; when its waves mount up, you still them.
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Thanks for being the Lilo to my Stitch, even though you seriously get on my nerves sometimes. But hey, I guess that just further exemplifies out Lilo-and-Stitch type relationship.
Thanks for being loyal, kind but blunt when need be, loving, exciting while at the same time slight fun-sucker-ish, beautiful, and smart. Thanks for always putting up with me and standing by my side when I seem the least bit folly {you better get the reference}.
xoxo