LOL With Taylor Elyse

Our next LOL guest is Taylor a gorgeous blog pal.

Hi y’all! I’m Taylor and I blog over at Live and Move. I’m currently a college student going into my junior year. (Time flies!) I love a perfect cup of tea, conversations that stir my heart and warm my soul, taking pictures, watching old movies, listening to old Motown records on my record player, and falling asleep under warm covers.

I’m not really a fan of people who are prideful or disingenuous. I don’t like most Top 40 music. It’s too formulaic and shallow. But enough about things I that annoy me! Let’s talk about living out loud.

For me, living out loud means living a life that means something in the big picture. As a Christian, that meaning is shaped by choosing to live a life that has an eternal impact. It’s hard. I fall so short of that standard. My journey to living a life out loud started the summer before my freshman year of college and continues even now. It’s a journey largely facilitated by books .That summer, I read Crazy Love by Francis Chan and Don’t Waste Your Life by John Piper.

They do such a good job of highlighting the frivolity of what is so often defined as success in our culture. It challenged me and grew me to the point that my boyfriend said he felt like he was dating a different person. At school, I read One.Life by Scott McKnight. That book is all about building a dream that Jesus can weave into his kingdom dream. I go back to that book every so often. It’s worn, highlighted, dog-eared, and generally loved. Around November of that year I read the Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne. It shook me and challenged me to make buying decisions that reflected God’s heart. For me, this means trying to be a more conscious consumer. So much of what we buy cheaply is produced through the exploitation of people in other countries.

This summer, I read Kisses from Katie. This girl is barely three years older than me. She packed up, moved to Africa, adopted 11 beautiful girls, and started a nonprofit. Her passion and spirit inspired me to sponsor a Compassion child. She’s a beautiful four year old girl named Yenmi. One day I hope to travel to El Salvador and meet her! The people who wrote each of these books that shaped me inspire me simply because they took action. They followed God in ways that were uncomfortable and that seem strange in the context of our culture. They seriously count everything but Jesus as a loss.

I’m inspired by people who take their talents and use them for His glory. They don’t necessarily put a label of Christian on it, but their hearts for God are so evident. I want to be that. I’m not now and I never will fully be.

I think the best way to start living out loud is to find what inspires you to take action and then do it. Read books if you’re like me. Watch videos. Talk to someone who you admire. And then apply it. The gap between thinking and doing can be so wide at times. I know that too well. I hope that my little attempts at living out loud inspired you to take even a baby step in the right direction. God will use that!