Apart From This World:

Ladies-

Welcome to our first blog post! Liz and Kayla here. We want to address a couple of things in this post, but first, a little background about us.

Names: Liz Collins and Kayla Phillips
Relation to each other: Best friends going on 5 years.
We enjoy: Singing, writing, reading, taking slow walks on the beach…

Okay, but for real… Our names are Liz Collins and Kayla Phillips. We’re both college freshman. We’re both worship leaders and aspire to work with teen girls. We’re been best friends for close to 5 years. We met in freshman year and became fast friends. We rarely did anything without each other. We ended up going to the same highschool together starting in junior year when Liz transferred to my (Kayla) school. Right before our senior year, Liz had to move 1200 miles away. We were both heart broken. I went to school day in and day out, wishing I had my best friend to spend my senior year with, and she was taking classes online through our school wishing the same thing! 4 months into our senior year, our parents told us that she would be moving back for the 5 months left in our senior year to live with me. We were able to walk together (graduation) and sang together at the ceremony. She then moved back, but we have kept our friendship strong despite the distance and we both know we’re in the places we are now for a reason.

Now that our personal background is out of the way, the other, and most important, thing we want to address in this post is our vision for this blog. God had been speaking to me (Kayla) a lot over the past couple months about “small steps” and how we need to focus on them instead of the big steps that we have to take to get to God’s goal for us. If we focus on only the end goal, we bite off more than we can chew, get discouraged, and great, God-given ideas belly-flop. So, God had been bringing up the topic of starting off with small steps very frequently in sermons, blog posts, emails, etc. He had also been bringing up the fact that today is the best day to start taking those small steps. Not tomorrow, not next week, today. So that should be easy, right? Not so much. I started asking God how I was supposed to do that practically. For a while I didn’t get a specific answer. I was studying one morning after doing my devotion and all of the sudden, it hit me.

Liz and I have always known what we wanted to do. We both have a strong passion for helping out middle and high school girls, in whatever capacity that may be. However, we are both drawn towards ministry. Anyways, it just all clicked and after realizing that starting a blog would be one of the first building blocks, I called Liz and she was all in, as I knew she would be. We started tossing ideas around and decided that this blog would simply be all of our collective thoughts, inspirations, ideas, etc. about being “apart from this world” and practical ways to apply that in everyday lives and situations. In things such as respect, purity, boys, makeup, modesty, friendship, beauty, self-esteem, and whatever else we may decide!

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”  -Romans 12:2

God calls us to be set apart from this world. To be in this world, but not of this world. To love and accept the people, but not the ways. That, we believe, is truly one of the most important and core things about and being Christ-like. He was set apart; there was no one like Him, and there has been no one since. We must strive to be like that.

We’re just two girls who struggle with inadequacy, insecurity, and overall sin just as much as the next person. But we’re two girls who have been called by the One who does not. Every word that will show up on your computer screens from our blog will have been prayed about and meditated on. We will not lead you astray, because these are not our words. We are only the messengers.

We hope you enjoy our blog and pray that God works through it in ways only He can do.