What I learned at Malibu

I just got back from a month of work crew at Younglife's beautiful Malibu Club in British Columbia. The first question everybody who I have talked to since I've been back is: what did you learn? And I learned so much. I learned how to fold a fitted sheet, I learned how to use an industrial strength washing machine, I learned that even though you can use a dust pan with one person, a buddy always makes it more fun, I learned that Taylor Swift Tuesdays are a necessity in breaking up the mundanity of constant work, I learned how to do the Cupid Shuffle, I learned that it is impossible to make hospital corners on a top bunk without moving the mattress to the floor, I learned that you need to take time to appreciate beauty and when you don't it slaps you in the face, I learned that there is nothing more repulsive than pulling hair out of shower drains, and I learned that there is nothing more special than friendships drenched in honesty, respect, and love, and I learned, most importantly, that God loves me. The fact that God loves me sounds so elementary and it is. I grew up going to church and every Sunday morning we would sing "Jesus loves me this I know" and I knew it. I knew that He loved me and I knew the verse that told me He did (John 3:16), but my heart is fleeting and I forgot. This year has been one of the hardest years of my life. Bad things happened to me and I made bad things happen to myself and those bad things pushed me away from Jesus. But the beautiful thing about Jesus is that He had me in the palm of his hand the whole time. When I got to Malibu I wanted to leave. Everyone was praising a God I wasn't familiar with anymore and I wasn't opening up to anyone. If Work Crew had just been a week, I would have been able to be stubborn through it and come home unchanged. But over the course of a month Jesus broke me down. He made me show my new friends the things that had hurt me and He knew that they would love me through it. He gave me older people to speak wisdom and inspiration into my life. He made me fall in love with him again. 

Psalm 40: 1-4
I waited patiently for the Lord;
    he turned to me and heard my cry.
2 He lifted me out of the slimy pit,
    out of the mud and mire;
he set my feet on a rock
    and gave me a firm place to stand.
3 He put a new song in my mouth,
    a hymn of praise to our God.
Many will see and fear the Lord
    and put their trust in him.

But I want to be super clear on two points. First, it wasn't Malibu. It wasn't the place. Jesus used Malibu to get to me, but he could have used my bedroom or my school or my campaigners group. He loves me enough to give me that experience and amazing friends and use the place and the people to change me. Second, it's not over yet. I am still broken and I will still be broken for the rest of my life, but I need to surrender my brokenness to my God every single day and He will use my brokenness for His Greater Good and that is all I can ask for and that hope is all I need. 

Infinite Summer

Los Vendidos recorded another album. It is called Infinite Summer and I am incredibly proud of it and truly poured myself into its creation.

http://www.mediafire.com/?u00ox2mccog72ot

New Song

This is a song that I wrote and recorded. I hope you like it!
http://www.mediafire.com/?hcd44m5dier6an9

HAPPY NEW YEAR'S EVERYONE.

I am so glad 2011 is over. Here's to summer 2012, starting senior year, and finally applying to colleges. Life is starting this year.

Free download of my awesome brother's amazing new album.
http://www.mediafire.com/?21iyvkmesx24ujb

Download. Listen. Enjoy.

New Year's Eve

I think it is pretty typical to get sentimental on New Year's Eve and I am no different. This year was pretty nuts. Today, I spent a good chunk of time reflecting on my past year and I realized how much things have changed and how much I have grown.

This year I have learned immeasurable amounts about myself. I have become overly dependent on people when scripture says the only thing we can truly be dependent on people. I haven't done that this year and I've hurt a lot of people in that process.

So this year, I am going to leave this dependent part of myself behind and try to right some of the wrongs I have created in the past year. It's not going to be easy but my New Year's Eve vow is to try as hard as I possibly can is to make those people feel wanted and repair all the damage I have caused in the past. We only have a year and a half of high school left and I don't want to be spending it wishing I was graduating this spring. I want to enjoy my life with my friends. Statistics say you will only be friends with about 2 of your high school friends by the time you graduate from college. At this point, it looks like 0 of my friends are going to want to be friends with my by the end of high school even.

That being said, this last year was a really difficult year for me. This year was the first year my brother Andy was at college and I missed him so much. My parents and I have never had a worse relationship that we have had this year. This year, my brother Charlie spent the entire year in Paris and I missed him so hard all year. This year, my parents got separated 3 different times and it seemed inevitable that they were headed for divorce. This year, one of my best friends overdosed and almost died. This year, the relationship I was working on for the last 4 years finally ended and I left heartbroken. This  year, my favorite uncle died.

That being said, this last year had some really, really great points. This last semester, I have done better in school than I have ever done. This year, I have grown in my songwriting ability. This year, one of my best friends was saved and now I know we will be friends for all of eternity. This year, I started leading WyldLife and I am really excited for what God will do with that. This year, I finally have some sort of a plan/dream for college and my life beyond college. This year, I had some life changing experiences and memories I will never, ever forget. This year, I played the best show I have ever played and finally played my music for the people who are important to me and got really good feedback about it. This year, I was inducted into NHS. This year, I got much closer to Jesus.

Highlights of my year.

• January:

I went to a leadership retreat in Flagstaff and GeoCached around the town in pirate outfits. Awesome.

• February:

I spent a weekend working at Lost Canyon while middle school kids learned about Jesus. So much fun and incredibly humbling.

• March:

I went snowboarding in Utah with YoungLife friends and visited my cousins in Texas while going to SXSW. Also I turned 16!

• April:

I went to the Mumford & Sons and Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zero's concert and then a week later I went to the Edward Sharpe concert again. So much love.

This is one of my favorite pictures ever even though I am barely in it.

• May: 

School's out and I played Pomp & Circumstance at graduation.

• June:

Summer camp at Crooked Creek Ranch and visited my friends in Washington. So nice to be home.

• July:

My uncle got married in Virginia and we were touristy around DC and toured University of Virginia and George Washington. Also I did a backpacking trip on a glacier in British Columbia.

• August: 

Back to school. Boo. Only eventful thing all month was going tubing with my friends on Lake Powell.

• September:

Leadership weekend at Lost Canyon. Awesome speaker. Awesome worship. Awesome pranking Rick.

• October:

Surf camp in Encinitas. While other people went shopping, I spent an entire morning surfing with Rick and Mike. Good times.

• November:

Momma's Birthday in which Andy & Charlie came home.

• December: 

End of 1st semester Christmas, Grand Canyon, wisdom teeth removal, best show we've ever played.

And this is not a picture of any of those events, rather this is the YL Christmas party with my WL team.

Best shows of 2011:

• Edward Sharpe (times 2)
• Mumford & Sons
• Bright Eyes
• Death Cab
• City & Colour
• Macklemore & Ryan Lewis
• Old Crow Medicine Show
• Bon Iver
• Fleet Foxes

Favorite bands of 2011:

• Edward Sharpe
• Mumford & Sons
• The Weepies
• City & Colour
• Macklemore
• Noah & The Whale
• The Tallest Man on Earth
• Pink Floyd
• Nirvana
• Bon Iver
• Fleet Foxes
• The Head & The Heart
• The Smiths
• Neutral Milk Hotel
• The Taxpayers
• The Arcade Fire
• The Swell Season
• The Velvet Underground
• Joanna Newsom

Favorite Movies of 2011:

• The King's Speech
• Water for Elephants
• Bridesmaids
• Super 8
• The Art of Getting By
• Crazy, Stupid, Love.
• The Help
• Footloose
• Young Adult

Favorite Books of 2011:

• The Color Purple
• Blue Like Jazz
• Catcher in the Rye
• Catch-22
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

So goodbye 2011. I am really ready for you to be over and I am so excited for everything 2012 has in store for me. And as most people I know are partying to celebrate this new year, I will be hiking a mountain and drinking in the beauty of the world as the new year rolls in.

Come at me 2012.

Grand Canyon

On the day after Christmas, Boxing day if you will, my family and I embarked on a journey around Arizona. We drove straight from Phoenix to the Grand Canyon stopping only to have a picnic in Flagstaff. The car ride was filled with the family rotating their CD choices. Lovely. Andy chose some old Folky guy with weird lyrics that nobody particularly enjoyed except for him. I made a playlist on my iPod that I thought everyone would approve of, but that was indeed wishful thinking. We did have some great sing-a-longs to The Funeral by Band of Horses and Mykonos by Fleet Foxes. It was nice. Charlie played some electronica and everyone pretended to like it. Love family. Every time we would stop for a bathroom break of a food break, Lola would get comfortable in our seat and every time we started driving again, Charlie would have to throw her back in the backseat. She would instantly turn into a noodle dog and squirm until Charlie got her in the backseat.

We got to The Grand Canyon Village which is basically hotels and restaurants and dropped our luggage off at our hotel and entered Grand Canyon National park. We walked around the rim for a while and stopped at Bright Angel Lodge on the South Rim. The Grand Canyon is ridiculously beautiful. It makes you feel so small and insignificant when you are standing on the edge of this billion year old thousand acre wide beast of a monument. We listened in on a 45 minute lecture by a ranger about the formation of the canyon. Basically, a tiny river carved out solid rock with patient erosion and friction. The canyon becomes the depth of a paper deeper every year. When you look at the canyon and how deep it is, you get a ridiculous sense of how old it is. With every step you take into the canyon, you are stepping over thousands of years of the canyon's life. Crazy. After it got too cold to be on the rim we drove back into town and stopped and ate at a pretty bad mexican restaurant called The Mexican Restaurant. Then we settled into our hotel room. It was a tiny room with two queen size beds and there are 5 Boyds in the room. I slept with mom on a bed, dad got a bed to himself, and Charlie and Andy were both on separate cots. Sucks to suck. My dad snores like a fog horn and has sleep apnea so he has a loud machine called a CPAP. Needless to say nobody except dad got any sleep.The next morning, mom and dad left to get breakfast and the kids stayed in and got a solid 15 minutes of sleep. Then we headed back to the Grand Canyon for some hiking. Mom and Dad dropped us off at this road on the way to the South Kaibab Trailhead with way more water than we needed and way more clothing than was necessary. We walked to the trailhead and then began the trail. We stopped nearly every twenty feet so as to capture the beauty of the canyon sufficiently. We did not succeed, but we ended up with some fun pictures. We hiked all the way down to Cedar Ridge and enjoyed some granola bars and cheese. While we were at the Grand Canyon in 2004 we took a picture that is one of my favorite pictures we have ever taken.

We tried to recreate this picture, but we were in a different part of the canyon and had to use a timer. I still love the picture. We are so freaking cool.

After recreating pictures, eating food, doing a bunch more poses, and relieving our bladders, we began our ascent to the rim. The Grand Canyon is odd because usually when hiking, you start out going up and when you get tired you can turn around and easily go down. But when hiking the Grand Canyon, you do the easy part first and then you have to hike up when you're already pretty tired. It was rough especially because I had gotten my wisdom teeth taken out a few days prior to our hike and my mouth was swollen and in quite a bit of pain. But we finally got to the top and took the shuttle back to the lodge and watched a very educational video about the canyon and its history. Mom had prepared a lovely picnic at a table near our car and dad took the sleeping bag out of the car and was sleeping on the pavement when we got to the picnic. Classic. After packing up our trash, we checked out another museum and headed back on the road to Flagstaff. We ate dinner at a wonderful chinese restaurant and then hot tubbed in our hotel. Dad make awkward comments about the girls around us that were my age. Classic. We had two rooms at this hotel, so mom and dad were in one and the kids were in another with me on the cot and the boys each in beds. We crashed hard because of the lack of sleep and woke up to cheese sandwiches and hot cocoa provided by the wonderful momma.

The next morning, Charlie and I went to Snowbowl for a day of snowboarding. It was so much fun. The snow wasn't the best and there were cones around rocks that we were to avoid and the snow was pretty slushy, but I had a fantastic time. We had some major brother sister bonding and I even got some air on some jumps! Rad. Mom didn't give us enough money for food so we were stuck with rumblies in our tumblies but we enjoyed some chili cheese fries at the end of the day. Then we stopped at Chipotle for a burrito and of course Andy knew 5 people. We were in Flagstaff and he still has friends. Ridiculous. On the way home, we listened to a CD I made sometime last year and everyone enjoyed it. Even Lola.

All in all, it was a great trip. It was the first family vacation we have had since I can remember and I was reminded of how much my family rocks. They are all so funny and they think I am funny and I enjoy their company and they enjoy mine. Friends will fade but family is there to stay. I've always been more of a person to rely on my friends, but recently I have realized how important family is and that corny quote is the only way I can think to express how that feels. I love my family. I love Arizona. I love life.