Without Borders | Sin Fronteras

Something that I really enjoyed during my time as a student at Northwestern was our Sunday night Praise & Worship (P&W) sessions. It was such an awesome experience to gather with my friends, classmates, and professors each week to worship and hear more about how God was working in the lives of the students and faculty on campus.  Last semester at P&W one of my classmates shared a message about Ecclesiastes and the meaning/translation of the word " hebel ."  As someone who loves to study words and language, this message immediately captured my attention.  Hebel  is a Hebrew word that is used 38 times in the book of Ecclesiastes. Its meaning when translated into English is something along the lines of breath, vapor, or mist . While I'm not sure if any of these English translations fully capture the original meaning of their Hebrew counterpart , they do convey an idea of something that is fleeting or momentary--something that lasts only for a short time and

Last Wednesday, March 15th I celebrated my 22nd birthday. My birthday has become a time of reflection for me over the past few years and this year I spent some time reflecting on my birthday celebrations in recent years. As I thought about these special days, two memories really stood out to me.  The first memory is from three years ago when I was away at school during my freshman year of college. My mom (who was 8 hours away at the time) called my host mom and helped her plan a surprise visit to campus with cupcakes for me and my friends. The frosting on the cupcakes hadn't turned out right and my host mom was embarrassed, but I was so overjoyed by her thoughtfulness that I didn't even notice. And the second memory is from last year when I celebrated my birthday in Spain. My friends pretended like they were too busy to celebrate because they were studying for exams but they surprised me the next day when they "kidnapped" me, took me on a bus, blindfolded me, and wa