Today I had a really good day.  Instead of sitting in our dorm all day I went out with leilani an older friend from my organization who is here with her husband getting her masters degree.  She is really interested in civil war history so we decided to head out to the national battlefield and lookout mountain today.  I throughly enjoyed myself.  What can be exciting about looking at endless amounts of monuments among woods and fields where 30,000+(out of around 60,000 soilders)  people died while fighting over an area of 15 square miles?   I got to realize how amazing the world the Father created is, and I got to be introspective and think about how the human race could do something like kill that many people in the space of two months.  The second part was pretty sobering, but the first part was great.  As we were driving along we saw about twenty feet from my car, a mother deer and two baby fawns romping (really they were jumping around and just playing) at the edge of the forest in a meadow.  Really I think the highlight of my day was that.  I can't look at something like that and not see the Father.  The views from lookout mountain were pretty amazing as well.  The other part of my day that was great is that neither of us had to see it alone, like I had to do with the Tennessee Aquarium two weeks ago.  Anyways.  So that was my day.  Tomorrow I get to go white water rafting which I've never done, so that will be pretty exciting. 

I'm sitting in the dorm room I'm using for the month at Lee University and feeling a bit melancholy.  I should be working on a paper but that gets set aside as reflections on my life fill my head instead.  I turn 25 in an hour and fourty minutes, however as one friend pointed out on facebook, I am already 25 in Beijing time.  For some reason this year hit me more that I'm older and that sometimes the life the Father has in mind for us is not always the life we have in mind for ourselves.  Maybe it is because I'm now a quarter of a century old.  Maybe I'm just feeling like Ezekiel at the moment but parts of me see that if I stripped away everything in life, everything but the Father is meaningless.  How much of my time is spent in devotion to the Father and doing the things he would choose for me? and how much of my time is wasted?  I want to cry at things that I have left undone, conversations I should have had, letters I should have written.   In many ways I have chosen a path that presents itself with meaning, yet the things of this world hold me back just as much as the next person.  TV is the great time waster.  I can spend hours with a book and forget all else.  Overall I am happy with my life, and though there are parts of my life that have gone amazingly beyond where I ever expected myself to be at the age of 25, part of me longs for things that my friends have...marriage, a family, semi-permanance.  Yet if I had those things would I be even further distracted than I already am from the Father?  I don't really know the answer to that question.  Either way the Father is doing a work in me, and though I must have missed it, I don't remember Paul saying that Him doing a work in me would be so painful for my heart.    Sometimes the path we walk is not always an easy one.  And yet I still choose to walk it.  I do know that before my feet hit the floor tomorrow I need to ask the Father what can I do for Him today, not for myself. 

 

Why is it we never see what other people see in ourselves?  I've had to face hard things about myself this year, some of them coming from people who at the time I thought were friends.  Some people have told me that they see me as a confindant person who is sure of who she is and what she is doing, and where she is going.  Others say that I am insecure and can't stand to be alone.  Perhaps both are true.    Sometimes I see myself as invisible.  Who among peers is a whisp that is in and out, wanting to be seen as valuable.  I know I matter to my family, and for the most part I know I matter to my students from the love they display to me.  Kids are great like that, they give you tons of affection, and when I haven't been recieving it from anyplace else, it has made all the difference in the times when I've been excruciatingly lonely this year.  We all wonder if we make a difference in people's lives...I know that I do make a difference yet sometimes it is hard to see.  Sometimes the lies the enemy wants us to belive are really loud.  They can drown out the good voices.  The voice I try hardest to shut up is the "you're not good enough' voice.  Through the Son I am good enough.  He loves me and I am valuable to him.  I try to retain an optimistic outlook on life, as someone recently said to me "the Son is always shining".  I just need to look for it in all situations.  Anyway.  I don't know if anyone out in the void actually reads my blog, but there is a bit of a window into my soul, and some of my thoughts.  Sometimes being real is better than just talking about nothing or what is happening on a day to day basis.