Olivia Tan

Hello friends,

I wanted to write out some of my thoughts about the past few months; my attempts to convey them through video have been a hopeless failure to say the least. The first half of Senior year has been extremely difficult for me. Stress, anxiety, and exhaustion have been relentless feelings throughout this season in my life. For a while, I lost all drive and direction. I had no motivation to continue in what I was passionate about, and even the smallest tasks felt overwhelming. I let my YouTube channel go stagnent, I fell behind in school, and I could barely keep anything together.

Those months were probably the worst months I’ve had in about two years. I felt abandoned by God and extremely alone. There wasn’t one aspect of my life that I felt proud, or even excited about. But in a crazy turn of events, God shows up, and things start looking up (not that He was every really gone). God’s really revealed himself to me through everything I’ve been going through. The words, “God with us, God for us,” have been repeating in my head throughout this week and they’ve encouraged be to press through to the end of this semester.

God is so good and this rough patch has really made me realize how unfailing the Lord is. Psalm 23 has been on my mind a lot recently. Specifically, the image of God leading me beside still waters. At the climax of this angsty season, I experienced God in a wonderful way. I was watching the sunset on a windy afternoon and looking around at the trees and the leaves and the sky. I was so overwhelmed by God’s beauty in creation and in that moment I could distinctly feel the peace of the Lord over my life.

With all this said, I am not really sure creatively, where I am going from here. Videos have always been my way of self expression, but over the past few weeks I couldn’t film a video without it ending in frustration or tears. I’m trying out something new today, and maybe I’ll continue with it, but it will ultimately come down to trial and error. I’ll be posting where to find these updates on my Instagram and hopefully by 2017 I’ll have something figured out. I’m praying for clarity and direction and thank you to those of you who’ve stuck around. God Bless.