Hey friends and new friends!
For those who don’t know me, my name is Courtney Fontenot! I am 24 years old and a resident in the Nashville area, where I live in a cozy little apartment with my husband Nicholas! We have been married for almost a year now, and in the short amount of time that we have been married, I have learned so much about Nicholas, myself, and Jesus. I have many hobbies; photography, crocheting, drawing and hand lettering on my iPad, and doing anything outdoors with my husband.
I am so ecstatic to be able to communicate with you all through this blog! This has been a dream of mine for some time and the opportunity to do it with my sweet friend Samantha is such an awesome part of this dream! We hope that through this blog we touch your hearts and stir your affections for Jesus! Personally, I hope that I can begin to learn more about you all, learn what God is showing you in your walks, and learn from you as well!
I will be the first to tell you that I don’t have my life perfectly together. I am not the perfect Instagram newlywed, nor am I the perfect Christian Blogger. I have flaws. Sometimes I think too many of them. But yet, Jesus still loves me. Sometimes I am so fueled by my own rejections that I fail to run to Jesus when I feel less than. In fact, I didn’t really learn the value in this until my junior year of college. I was longing for something to fulfill me, but I didn’t know it was Jesus.
I grew up a preachers daughter, saturated in church life and the culture that comes along with it. I have never viewed this as a bad thing, in fact, I am very thankful for parents who raised me in a Christian home. I got saved at a young age, on the night of my eighth birthday to be exact! As much as I want to tell you that I lived a perfect life, I can’t. My teenage years were rough. Really, really rough. So rough, that my Sophomore year of high school, I had turned my back from God because I was so mad at Him for allowing certain things to happen in my life that year. It wasn’t until my Junior year of college, yes college, that I fully realized this. In Galatians 1:6-7, Paul writes “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—not that there is another one, but that there are some who trouble you and want to distort the Gospel of Christ.” There has never been a more accurate verse to describe my life in those five years. My soul was longing for God, but my heart was too preoccupied with flirting with the world to notice.
For five years, I fed myself a lie that I “made things right” with God. I enjoyed going to church again, I started loving myself and others again. I was “happy” again. Well, I thought that this was the case. Later in my junior year of college, I noticed that I had not really begun to live with a heart for God. I was still too fascinated with the short lived fun that the world had to offer. It took so long for me to grasp the concept that the world could not fully embrace me and love me as the Father could. I was an exhausted, empty shell of a person who only sought to please others and myself.
I got involved with a college ministry called the BCM. I loved this ministry with every ounce of my being. I made so many friends, met my husband there, and was offered so many opportunities to live a full life for Jesus while on a secular campus. Second half of junior year through senior year, I was ridiculously busy. Working at a church, running social media and other things for the BCM, trying to start up my photography business, classes, boyfriend…there was a lot going on. I later discovered that I was filling my life and free time with so many church and ministry related opportunities that I began to lose focus. My focus drifted from things that God was trying to show me to what made me look like a good cultural Christian in college. Yes those things were great, but my inside was crying out to know Christ more deeply.
Although I grew up in a Christian home, I never really liked reading the Bible on my own. Learning how to study the Bible for my own self was so hard for me to learn, and I still struggle with it. Recently, I read Jen Wilkin’s book, “Women of the Word” and this helped me realize that the Bible isn’t a book about me. This was and still is something that I struggle with. I often open my Bible hoping that God will give me some magic verse or epiphany to solve all of the problems in my life at that moment. When reading the Bible in the past, I often anxiously opened my Bible with my me-centered reading approach, hoping God wouldn’t point out my flaws. When I really began to dig deep into scriptures, I began to find that the love that I was searching for, the love my soul was yearning for, was found in those pages. I began to understand the fullness of a love that can only come from truly giving everything to Jesus. A love that can only spring from the living water found in scriptures. My life in love with Jesus was so much fuller than I could have ever imagined! Finding fullness in the Father is a life filled with peace and comfort that I cannot find anywhere in the world. I learned that God places His love on me and does not base his love on me. I don’t have to fight or try to win affection from him, he gives it daily. My whole life, I have always wanted to fit in. For those years in highschool, I was looking for something to fulfill me. I was broken and empty and I expected people to fill my brokenness. Jesus is the only thing that could ever fill the deep part of my soul.
Recently, I have been studying the book of John. In chapter 15, Jesus talks about pruning the vines as a metaphor to how he grows us spiritually. When I look at that section of scripture and how much I have grown in recent years, I cannot help to dwell on the fact that Jesus constantly pursued me. In the darkest part of my life, my lowest of lows, he was there pruning me. When I would shed tears studying his word with a heavy heart of conviction, the conviction that I used to avoid, he was there pruning me and molding me.
If you get anything from all of this, it is that God is waiting and ready to begin molding you into the person He wants you to be. None of us will ever reach that point this side of eternity, but through God, His Spirit, and the conviction and guidance that comes from the Word, we can spend each day more like Jesus than the one before and become more fulfilled by Him than we could ever imagine.
Thank you all for joining us on our blog, we hope to hear from you all soon! I am so excited to be sharing on this platform!
Be a Blessing,
-Courtney F.
Comments