Image Not Showing in Blog Post Excerpt

For the life of me I can not figure this simple thing out. Essentially, I want either the first image of my blog post or the featured image to show with the excerpt of my blog posts. If you view my blog page here http://thesimplicities.com/journal/ you will see that it only shows the title of the post and no image. I am using a gallery plugin to share photos in my blog posts. I have tried to insert a singular image before the gallery. This image shows in the post but does not show in the excerpt. I have also tried setting a featured image with the same result, shows in the post but not in the excerpt. I would really appreciate some help here!! Thanks