answered prayers

If you've been following me on Facebook, you know that I've been traveling a lot this summer.  I've been to Guatemala, Honduras, and to Florida twice.  The entire family will be flying out to Colorado at the end of this month for my cousin's wedding.  Traveling can be relaxing, at least it is for me, but it can also lead to a lot of extra thinking time, which for me, can lead to worry and stress.  So something I've been trying to do lately is pray about things instead of worry about them.  I'm very glad I did because God has shown up in two amazing ways.

1. Money for College
I graduated at the end of May, but I still need to do an internship in order to officially complete my degree.  This isn't an ordinary internship, but rather an internship that I get 12 hours of college credit for, as well as an internship that I have to pay full tuition for.  So, far, with help from both parents and grandparents, I have been able to pay cash for every semester of college thus far.  So this fall is the last semester of college that I will have to pay for, and if I can do it without taking out a loan, I will graduate completely debt free.  However, with my dad planting a new church in East Athens (livinghopeathens.org) and both my college fund and the one my parents and grandparents set up for me completely drained, there's not too much money for the almost $3,000 that this fall of tuition will cost (and that's after HOPE scholarship and many fees have been waved).  Rather than panic or worry or completely stress out about finances, I decided to pray.  I prayed for God to provide with no idea what that would look like.  So...to make a long story short, when I got home from my trip to Honduras, my parents told me that a family member recently sold a very valuable painting to a museum, leaving $3,000 to each of us grandchildren who've graduated high school to use for further education purposes.  This is the exact amount that I will need to finish out college debt free.  God is so good.

2. Rosetta Stone, the language learning program
Future plans indicate that I will most likely spend some extended time in a Spanish-speaking country.  I would really like to be close to fluent before moving there.  I took four years of Spanish in high school, but 5 years of college have kind of made me forget.  I want to learn it all over again, and Rosetta Stone started to seem like the best way to do so.  However, $500 is the cost of all the levels, and as I mentioned before, I don't have that kind of money.  So, again, I prayed.  I prayed specifically for the product as I might be tempted to use $500 for something else if I was just given the money.  So again, when I got back from Honduras, I come down the stairs and my mom so non-nonchalantly says to me, "hey, did I tell you that I bought Rosetta Stone!?"  I was shocked.  She said there was a sale so she bought it.  She had no idea I was praying for it.  God is so good.