outpouring

Blessings upon blessings! I am now both 22 and graduated and much surrounded by people who love me. This week has been extraordinarily hectic and exhausting but full of gifts and words of encouragement and congratulations. It has been a week of goodbyes to all in Bowling Green, greetings to relatives in town to celebrate from all over the country and world, and fun times together. My family is endlessly delightful, in that they are CRAZY, smart, and O so funny. So witty and hillarious. What a bunch of delightfully supportive, funny, loving characters. I treasure having my nurse Aunt Cheryl in town from Bangladesh, all of my grandparents here from New Orleans, Cousin in from Jackson, and California relatives as well. Add that to my groovy immediate family and it is a cool fest to the max. Laughing our heads off. Me being overwhelmed with generosity and them being so proud of me. I don't know how to take it all. I don't even know how I made it through the past 2 years of school; Nursing kicked my butt. It wasn't me that got me through, but Grace. But God placing people in my life to challenge and encourage at the crucially needed moments and somehow surviving. All I did was not quit, and even that, a miracle. A deep and contented and grateful {SIGH}. Help me pour into others with all that I have been deluged with, Lord.

These cycles

doubt, disobedience, discouragement, disobedience, doubt, discouragement, and discouragement....
and then...
divine intervention
brokenness, humility, peace.

Last week at school, EVER

So I turn 22 in three days, and graduate in four days. Then school's out for the summer, and possibly, forever. Then I have to find a real life job. So I am frantically trying to see everyone here at Western that I may never see again when I move to San Francisco, far far West from here. This is a big week; I also have about a million family members in town for the nursing convocation annd university graduation. So, it's cool, will be fun, just have MANY loose ends to try to find, connect, and wrap up in finality.

I'm going to miss my oasis in the nursing desert next year

LA: Do you not like tomatoes?
Me: I like them in some things.... Why?
LA: I've always said I don't trust anyone who doesn't like tomatoes.
Me: What? Why not?
LA: I've just never been able to trust anyone who doesn't like tomatoes.
Me: Oh. Ok, in that case I like them pretty well.

The Shins

Pink Bullets

I was just bony hands as cold as a winter pole. You held a warm stone out new flowing blood to hold. oh what a contrast you were to the brutes in the halls. my timid young fingers held a decent animal.
Over the ramparts you tossed the scent of your skin and some foreign flowers, tied to a brick, sweet as a song, the years have been short but the days were long.
Cool of a temperate breeze from dark skies to wet grass, we fell in a field it seems now a thousand summer passed. When our kite lines first crossed we tied them into knots. To finally fly apart, we had to cut them off. Since then it's been a book you read in reverse, so you understand less as the pages turn, or a movie so crass and awkwardly cast that even I could be the star.
I don't look back much as a rule and all this way before murder was cool but your memory is here and I'd like it to stay, warm light on a winters day.
Over the ramparts you tossed, the scent of you skin and some foreign flowers, tied to a brick, sweet as a song, the years have been short but the days go slowly by, two loose kites falling from the sky, drawn to the ground and an end to flight.

...


--I don't necessarily understand what all of these lyrics mean, but the imagery is great and it is really a beautiful song, in my humble opinion. Evokes powerful sentiment. You should listen to it. It's on the spectacular album Chutes Too Narrow, which was given to me by a dear friend who knows me well.

realization of fundamental woundedness in human nature

"No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good."
Mere Christianity by CS Lewis

"One must really have suffered oneself to help others."
-Mother Teresa

That's me. However Lynn cut herself out of the picture--oops

in the dorm 

hello

Alright, I have a place for some thoughts now; however, I have no idea what I am doing. Not very technologically adept. I am trying to figure out how to format everything. More to come.