Pumpkins at 2am

A few weeks ago I had fall break.  The first night that I was back in my hometown, I didn't sleep in my own bed.  Instead, I stayed at my friend's house.  There were a few of us there and we had spent the evening at a corn maze.  Then, after getting back the friend's house, we decided that we needed to do something else with the rest of our night.

We decided to go buy pumpkins.  As it was fall and Halloween had not yet passed we decided that jack-o-lanterns would be the most logical thing to make from our newly-purchased pumpkins.  Of course after we bought them and carved them we needed some place to put them.  We could have put them on my friend's porch, but my friend was headed back to her college the next day, so she wouldn't even be able to enjoy them.  As such, we decided that the best thing to do with our pumpkins was to let someone else enjoy them.  And so, after we had pulled out all of the gook from the inside of the pumpkins and carved a variety of things into our pumpkins, we walked across town with them and left them on the porch of our high school guidance counselor's house.

Something to note is that my hometown is very small.  After it is dark no one really is really around town, so 3 teenage women walking across town carrying carved pumpkins is relatively conspicuous and inconspicuous at the same time.  This is sort of the same concept as a tree falling in the woods making noise if no one is around to hear it.  Basically, if 3 girls are walking around town with carved pumpkins, are they conspicuous? Yes.  But what if no one is there to observe their conspicuousness?  Are they still conspicuous?  I think they are and here is why:

When my guidance counselor looked at her porch the next time, it was going to be very obvious what we had done.  Her small porch was going to be a billboard of the "mischief" that my friends and I had taken part in that night.

But I think that is how we should live our lives.  And no, I don't mean that you should leave pumpkins everywhere you go.  I mean leave a trace of yourself everywhere you've been.  Or more accurately, leave a trace of the light of Jesus everywhere you go.  If you only serve God when people are watching, they'll recognize you as a nice person.  But if you continue serving even when other people aren't around, the world will want to know who is performing these acts of servant hood, and if we're honest with ourselves the answer isn't a person.  It's God.  God will use your talents as a tool to serve others.  And that, is pretty amazing.

Also, here our pumpkins: pumpkin pie, odd face, and a kitty :)

On a separate note, the likelihood of a blog being posted for the next week is slim.  I have 3 exams split between Monday and Tuesday.  As for the week after that, a blog might happen on Tuesday, but I will not make any promises, as I have an exam on Monday.