"Ways to Show Him Love" (Guest Post)

Happy Thursday Sweet Friends!
Today I am guest posting over at A Worker At Home :-) Ekk... my first guest post, so exciting! Katie has grown to be one of my sweetest bloggy friends over the past two months and I am so excited for her and her husband to be preparing for baby girls's arrival! So hop on over to her blog today to show her some love and read my first guest post!

A Worker at Home Guest Post

Five on Friday: Valentine's Edition

Happy Friday and Happy Valentine's Day! I'm excited to be celebrating one of the first major holidays of 2014 and even though I'm not at home, I'm sending lots of extra love back to my favorite people in North Carolina today. Today's a little bittersweet for me as this is the 5th Valentine's Josh and I have celebrated together but also the first that we don't get to be together. 502 miles separate us today but I can promise you that won't stop us from have a wonderfully long Skype date tonight! (Oh modern technology, I am so thankful for you!) So today I'm linking up with my favorite ladies for Five on Friday and I'm doing this post a little differently than normal. Today is all about looking back on the past five Valentine's I've spent with Joshua. Enjoy :-)
one// 2010

Our first Valentine's Day came a little over 3 months into us dating. We spent the weekend in Chapel Hill and got to experience our first snow fall together. We ate dinner at a Japanese restaurant and then had a snowball fight outside his Carolina dorm room. 
two// 2011

Valentine's Day number two was spent having Josh as my date to my sororities date function. The theme was "Famous Couples" so we went as the red and green M&M. Pretty clever right?
three// 2012

By 2012, Josh was interning as a youth pastor so we spent our Valentine's weekend skiing with 30 youth group members in West Virginia. Luckily no broken bones happened! 
four// 2013

Valentine's our senior year of college was celebrated with hearing the acceptance of Josh getting into grad school at Wake Forest! 
five// 2014 And since we aren't together today for me to snap a picture, I made Josh a little surprise montage of many of our pictures together. This is what I sent him earlier today, so if you have 4.5 minutes to spare you can take a little laugh at how much our looks have changed in the past five years!

Valentine's Day 2014 from Alyssa on Vimeo.

Happy Valentine's day to all of you, my sweet sweet friends! 

Valentine's Wish List

Oh my goodness gracious, can y'all believe it's already the last week in January? I feel like every month for the past year has flown by and I'm always left wondering where time has gone. This past week has been crazy with job travel and delay after delay in airports with the southern snow but I have finally made it to New Jersey!
With January on the way out, I've turned my focus to the holiday of love. Aka Valentine's Day! Now don't get me wrong, I love any excuse to get dressed up and have a fancy meal out with my hunk of a boyfriend, but I also feel that the way we treat someone on February 14th should be how we treat them all year. Anyone else agree with me? This is even a more true feeling with me this year as I'm on the road and won't be anywhere near Josh to celebrate, so I guess we will be having a good ole' Skype date! 
Even though I don't like to go super overboard for this holiday, I still have my eyes on a few favorite things that I wouldn't mind having shipped my way. I mean a girl can dream right? So here are my 2014 Valentine favorites:

1: Kate Spade Be Mine Pave Stud Earrings: $48 2: NYX Matte Lipstick Pale Pink: $14 3: Naked3: $52 4: Kate Spade Polka Dot Phone Case: $40

Earthly Love

If you read my post yesterday you saw that Josh and I were starting a new devotional together for dating couples. I've always been a little nervous to post about my faith on here because I didn't want to turn people away but because of the wonderful Elise over at Cheers Y'all, I've been inspired to post about my faith today in hopes that it will inspire somebody else. 

Josh and I have been dating long distance over four years now and I honestly don't know if we would have gotten through some of our loneliest times apart without our relationship being centered around Christ. While I've been blessed with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel this year, Josh has started divinity school with the dream of becoming a youth pastor. I am so blessed by the love he shows me on a daily bases and I am thankful that I have someone in my life who pushes me to grow stronger in my faith. 

Last night we started our new devotional together, "Devotions for Dating Couples", and it's a 9 week devotion that will focus on a different aspect of our spiritual lives each week. This first week is love, and last night was powerful. 

Last night focused on the true love that God has for us. His love comes without any strings attached and is more perfect than the earthly love we share with our special someone. The one thing that stuck out to me last night was that our passionate earthly love is just a tiny, tiny, tiny pinch of how much God loves us. Just when we don't think we could love any more, well, God loves us unlimited times that. 

I'm not going to be posting about this devotional daily on here but if you would like to follow along I highly encourage you to follow me on Instagram @SouthernAbundanceBlog where I will post daily scripture like the one above! So if your dating or engaged to a special someone and are looking for a wonderful devotional to do together, I highly recommend this one! Happy Tuesday beautiful's! :-)

Amazon 

Christmas Rewind Part 2 + A Birthday Celebration

Good Morning Sweet Friends!

Have I said lately how thankful I am for each of you? Well, in case you didn't know I am VERY thankful for each of you who read this blog on a daily basis. It's because of you all that I'm challenging myself to make Southern Abundance blog bigger and better in 2014...but more about that tomorrow. Today we have a little rewinding to do!

If you missed my Christmas Rewind Part 1 from yesterday, you can hop on over here and catch up! Now on to Part 2:

I always spend a few days after Christmas with Josh and his family as his birthday is December 26th. This year we spent his actual birthday touring downtown Fayetteville and window shopping in little antique stores. Historic downtown was still decorated for the holidays and it was just nice to walk hand in hand with one another down the sidewalks. 

After a day spent walking and shopping, we went out to eat with his family for a wonderful birthday dinner. Before dinner I decided to dig up some old pictures of him so you all could see what a cute little boy he sure was! 

On Friday I finally gave in to four years of being asked to go hunting and decided to sit with Josh for a few hours in his families tree stand in the woods. Luckily we saw no deer because I think I would have cried if he actually shot one but it was a beautiful day to watch the sunset over the vast country fields!

I hope you all have a wonderful Monday :-) Make sure to check back tomorrow as I make a big announcement!

Flashback: The Start of Us

So if you read my post last Friday, you learned that Josh, my wonderful boyfriend, and I will be celebrating 4 happy years together later this month. I posted a few pictures of us together and posed the question for you to e-mail me with where you thought we met. Several of you responded and guessed college, a bar, and a basketball game. Well, none of those are even close so I thought today I would do a little flashback and tell you all the story of how we started dating...apologizes ahead of time for the possibly long and cheesy post! 


Flashback to the 60s/70s
Our parents grew up in the same community and went to the same high school. My aunt became high school best friend's with Josh's mom and still to this day do almost everything together.

Flashback to Easter 1994
When my parents got married in the 80s, they were the only siblings in both of their families to move away from their hometown. I grew up 2 hours northwest of my entire family and well Josh as well. Growing up, my parents and I would always drive down to my Grandparents church for any holidays and I would go into my Grandma's Sunday school class. Josh and his family attended the same church as my Grandparents and Josh was in my Grandma's Sunday school class. Well on Easter 1994 she captured a picture that she later gave to Josh and I; it is of us in her same Sunday school classroom. I guess you can say this is the first time we officially met!

Flashback to the late 90s-2000s 
Josh attended elementary through high school with all of my cousins and they all grew up together. He continued to attend my grandparents churn and my aunt always loved Josh and his younger brother. In high school, my aunt would always mention how she wanted me to meet this really great young man named Josh because he was perfect for me but of course growing up two hours apart from one another I thought it would be weird to have a long distance boyfriend in high school...so we never met.

October 2009
It was our freshman year of college. I attend UNC Charlotte and Josh attended UNC Chapel Hill. Our two schools were 3.5 hours apart and our paths had still not crossed. It was October 8, 2009 when I got the phone call that shook my world. I was getting ready to go to my first midterm as a college student when my aunt called to tell me she couldn't get ahold of my mom but Grandpa was being rushed to the hospital for having a heart attack. Little did I know at this point that my Grandpa had already passed away but my family didn't want me to be upset while making the four hour drive to where my family was. I quickly emailed my professors and rushed to Fayetteville, NC. When I met my family at the house I was told the news that I would never get to say goodbye to the one person who meant the world to me. 

Two days later the family was at the funeral home for my grandpa's visitation and that ladies and gentlemen is where I met Josh. Yep, you read that right. I met Josh at my grandpa's funeral visitation...I bet y'all never would have guessed that one! Shortly after the passing of my grandpa, Josh and I became friends on the big world of Facebook and started to message each other every few days. We finally exchanged numbers towards the beginning of November and on November 6th I went to UNC Chapel Hill to see my best friend in a play. I somehow remembered I had Josh's number and thought to text him. He agreed to meet me and my mom for dinner at [B]Ski's on Franklin Street and the rest is history. 

It took a few days for us both to get up the courage to tell one another we liked the other but I then began making weekly trips to good ole Chapel Hill since Josh didn't have his car freshman year. Right before Thanksgiving break we were on a little date night walking around campus. When we got to the intramural fields we stopped to look at the starts and then Josh asked if he could call me his girlfriend...the rest has been nothing but memories! 

So come November 21st we will have been together 4 years! And yes, if you've put two and two together we have dated long distance the entire four years...including SUPER long distance as I've been traveling the country this year! Josh graduated this past May and is now in his first year of grad school at Wake Forest University! Now that you've learned a little about "us" I'll share some pictures with you that way you don't have to keep reading words! Enjoy :-) 

Five on Friday!

Sorry for the delay in writing another post! I have spent so much time trying to read other blogs and spruce mine up for y'all that I got behind in writing However, I promise to start doing better!

I'm super excited to be joining my first link-up party and of course it's "Five on Friday"...hope you enjoy!

Link Here

[ONE]

Y'all, fall starts this weekend! Can you believe it?!?! I am such a fall girl that it isn't even funny. Want to know why I love fall so much? Well fall contains the following: my birthday, anniversary with my wonderful boyfriend, unlimited college football, colored leaves, apple cider, brisk weather, Thanksgiving, pumpkin carving, sweater weather...I could seriously go on forever! 

[TWO]

The food here in Philly is to die for! I mean just look at that french toast above, who could not love that? My joke has been it's a good thing I'm leaving Philly Monday or else I might soon go into a food coma! 

[THREE]

Loving the fact that I got to spend the day with my sweet sorority sister (Katie) and experience the history of Philadelphia with her. Being a history minor in college I just die inside when I get to visit monuments that are so important to our country's history. Today I finally got to visit the Liberty Bell! 

[FOUR]

While I have really loved my time in the North, I am excited to get back down South on Monday! I've never been to Louisiana before but that's where my job has me headed for next week. Here's to lots of shrimp and good times :-)

[FIVE]

And last but not least on the list today, my thankfulness for this handsome guy! Spending the past four years with him has been such a blessing and I am so lucky to have someone who supported my decision to take a year off after school to travel and challenge myself with my dream job. Thank you Josh for being the world's most amazing and supportive boyfriend <3