Being Authentic

Hello!! Well, to start, this is Vail writing!! (check out our previous "get to know us" post if you're new). I am so excited to launch this new experience and I am so thankful for everyone who has been alongside us during this journey!! Abounded In Grace has been such a blessing to me because I have learned and grown so much through it! I am writing this post about what has been on my heart recently and it felt like a good topic to sort of lead these future posts.

Throughout the past three or four months, God has shown me how so important it is to be authentic and real. You can easily look at our instagram and see photo upon photo of beautiful Bibles and it may seem that everything is as it should be, all together and perfect. The reality is that the first few weeks of this adventure, I wrote on a Bible and it turned out to be upside down! Or, how about this, a couple of weeks ago, I spilled my coffee all over a Bible! Or what about the time when we were unexperienced in shipping, and a Bible got crushed and destroyed in the mail! There have been many misspelled words, miscommunications, and much more than you can imagine. But this is where we can learn the most.

Everyone has flaws and every single person makes mistakes. We may look put together, but trust me, there are many many times when I just laugh at the silly mistakes I make, because honestly, what can you do about them? I wanted to write about this because God doesn't call us to just show the best sides of ourselves. This being said, I wanted to get real and share some of my messiness in my life.

For a while, I have struggled with anxiety and fear. If you were to ask the people closest to me, you would find out how much I worry, mostly about pointless things. Someone close to me just looked me in the eyes one time (probably while I was freaking out about who knows what) and said "Have you even given this over to God yet?". Woah. You don't know how hard that hit me, but in a good way. From then on, I have tried my best to stick to Philippians 4:6, "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God". Of course I am not perfect and I stray from this verse often, but it is such a good reminder for me to use prayer to let go of what my worries are and understand that God has everything under control.

Our goal over these posts is to be real and authentic with you all, but also with ourselves. We all have our issues, insecurities, stresses, but I believe God is going to use these posts to reach so many. He is going to use this to let us all know that we should not compare a pretty and put together collage of pictures to our messiness. Everyone has worries and issues. Even though, God loves us through our mistakes and mishaps.