Erin Jamieson

Have you ever watched the show Chopped ? I love that show. I love food; I love to cook; I love to watch people cook. So when I got struck down with the plague (aka, the flu) this week, I wasn’t binge watching Gossip Girl or chick flicks, I was hooked on the good old Food Network. Something that struck me between about episode five and episode six was that the trouble ingredients for the contestants across the board were not the foreign, no-one-actually-eats-this foods. They were the simple ingredients—the sweets. In one particular episode, the contestants were given bakery items in every basket—cakes, macaroons, cinnamon rolls. The contestants’ ideas were as brilliant as any professional chef could realistically come up with in 20 minutes or less. Yet the judges found the same thing every time—too sweet, too sweet, too sweet. As a [want to be] chef, my wheels started turning. Why is it so hard to turn sweet into savory? How can a sugary glaze ruin a pe...

I am all about metaphors. God speaks to me in metaphors. Maybe that's weird, maybe it's not. You tell me. Maybe that's why I'm a songwriter. But that is beside the point.  I think God loves to speak to us in metaphors. Not only because He is a creative guy Himself, but because He knows that because He is so "other-than" from us, there is no way we could grasp His character without likening it to things we already know.  Like the metaphor of a father. That's a good one. God is the ultimate and perfect Father. The One who abounds in love and goes to the ends of the earth, no, the ends of the heavens, to care for us. There's a song called "Good Good Father" by Housefires. It's probably best for you to go buy it on iTunes this very moment, but I digress... Metaphors. I think that anything in this world that is a metaphor for what God does for us or who He is to us is a good thing for us to take note of.  Now bear with me, I'm ...

"For you are all children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness" 1 Thessalonians 5:5 (ESV) I am a leader in a women's ministry on my campus called Delight and each week we read and discuss different stories from women all over the country. Delight believes in the power of the stories we each live and how our stories can affect and grow each other deeper in a relationship with the Lord.  This week, the story was about a girl named Caroline who found herself in a time of complete and utter darkness. Without even knowing why, somehow she slipped into a depression-like state and could no longer see the light. She didn't feel that the darkness would end; she couldn't see a way out.  There is so much darkness in this world. It comes with the territory. Fear is a fact of life. Most of us live in almost constant fear and we don't even know it. That's the scary part, we don't even know we are in a battle; we don't e...

Let’s just start with today. Today is the day I am to land (literally and figuratively) in my sophomore year at Belmont University. I started the day already in a flurry.  I spent the summer working. A whole lot. I wasn’t dying or anything, but there were moments in my own dramatized world where I felt I might. Nonetheless, there was little time in my schedule these past weeks to get my brain in order and start packing for my journey back to Nashville. I thought I was pretty much packed when we left on Monday for our three-day family “vacation” to Chicago (I say “vacation” because who can really be properly vacation-ed in 72 hours or less). It was a wonderful mini-getaway and we arrived home at approximately 1:30am. I woke up this morning realizing that in less than 6 hours, I needed to be in the car ready to drive to the airport. Our vacation to Chicago had excluded my little sister Carly due to all the variables and struggles of vacationing with her and we were all in ne...

Have you ever realized how much we use metaphors? It’s almost hard to speak without them. You can think of a metaphor for almost anything. And what’s more, it’s nearly impossible to find something you can’t think of a metaphor for. The Lord created this world to point to himself. C.S. Lewis says that the Lord cannot give us happiness outside of himself because it does not exist. I think that is also true of the world around us. The Lord cannot give us insight apart from things that point to Him because they do not exist.  If you are looking for Him, God can be found all around you. I like to think of them as God sightings. If you aren’t looking for Him, you might call them coincidences. I’m sure I am not the first person you have ever heard say the words, “I don’t believe in coincidences.” But I am not just saying that for the cliché. I truly believe that there is no such thing as a coincidence. Romans 8:28 says, “And we know that in ALL THINGS God works for the good of tho...

This weekend I went to a conference in Atlanta called the Passion Conference. It’s a pretty well-known get-together of Christian college-age students with headliners such as Francis Chan, Louis Giglio, John Piper and Christine Caine. Now I will back up a little bit to where this message met me. The Lord has been extremely evident and faithful in my life, especially recently. In the weeks and months before Passion, the Lord had been beginning to make Himself more known to me and also reveal in me a new heart. As this was happening, I began to think about my future and where my major and my current passions would lead me. The Lord showed Himself quite clearly in my time of uncertainty (as he always does) and was starting to reveal to me a glimpse of His plans for my future. Now, one thing you have to understand about me is that I am a planner. I am a dreamer. I dream big dreams, I plan how they will come about and then I say "God, I want to do this." After all, failing...