Life of Pride
Wow. What an incredible weekend - the HomeschoolAlumni National Reunion, organized by and for 20-something homeschool graduates, to talk about our generation's unique purpose. All of you previous homeschoolers reading this, especially those from PHC, join homeschoolalumni.org. This community is either a step beyond or alongside of PHC. I can't decide which. I will post more later, 'cause I expect Ashlea D. to arrive at my house any minute.
Today is a day for miscellaneous blog information. I just finished packing for my weekend trip to southern Missouri for the HomeSchoolAlumni.org
National Reunion. It took about half an hour. I've never understood people who require hours to pack for trips. Anyway, my next step is to "pack" my music for the road trip by creating some mixes and burning them. I'm thinkin' I will need much more time for this than I did for my clothes. :)
This morning I finished up my last day of volunteering for the kids' drama camp my church is running. I tore myself away with difficulty because everyone else still has one more day left. I have abandoned my group - the Orange Team! My sister, Magda, will step into my place, but I fear that this will be unsettling for the girls this last day as they prepare for the end-of-camp show. I will be praying for them tomorrow, and I have to remember to brief Magda on as many details as I can.
I expect a fascinating weekend. Nobody has planned a get-together specifically for homeschool graduates before, so far as I know. I am covering the event for
Practical Homeschooling, and I hope to solidify some preliminary theses I have concerning this first generation of homeschoolers.
Next week I'm going to sleep :D and also try to write twelve pages of fiction and an honor code enforcement system. Ashlea visits Monday. I think I'll take her to Monday evening Frisbee and then out to eat. :) Week after that I will be reading ahead in my fall semester schoolbooks, God willing.
So little summer remains. I'm somewhat leery of the school year, although I am looking forward to classes and to working on the play. As for student government stuff, I pray that other people will get together and do it all themselves. I will help facilitate that process however I can.
I am also looking forward to having my own room. I am going to decorate with maps, simply because I love them. They excite me, and they give me something to look at and get lost in as I stare into space. :) I assume I will have a second bed in the room; I'm going to turn it into a couch. My parents are giving me an old DVD player, so I am going to buy an inexpensive monitor and host a regular movie night. I think I can survive without spending money on a fridge and microwave, so long as I have a hot pot. Hot pots are cheap.
OK, that should be enough news to satisfy everyone's intense, burning desire to know what exactly I am doing. :)
I saw
Lady in the Water last night solely because
a friend liked it. She said it should be required viewing for any aspiring writer. I was hoping to like it, but my reaction was quite the opposite. The movie was simply terrible! I cannot believe how self-indulgent Shyamalan was in this collection of random thoughts. The plot is wildly improbably and coincidental; the characters have practically zero dimensions; and the overarching philosophy is impossible to determine. There was something about how mankind is worse now than it has ever been, how a writer ("acted" by a blank-faced Shyamalan) can impact Everything for Good, how it would be nice to be able to believe that stories are true, how all humans will work together in a good cause if they are only asked nicely, and a horde of other random and naive concepts. People throughout the theater, including myself, exploded in helpless snorts of laughter at the absurdity of some of the parts that were supposed to be most serious. One old man a few rows ahead of me fell asleep and started snoring loudly, which added to the general atmosphere. And I
liked the sour little critic, whom apparently we were supposed to despise.
OK, I'll give Shyamalan this. Rare moments here and there came together beautifully. Also, Paul Giamatti did a superb job. I think he has become one of my favorite actors. But otherwise - yuck, yuck, yuck! Bleh. I think I need to watch a little bit of
Braveheart.
---
EDIT: I didn't want to give spoilers, but after reading my friend's latest post explaining her own (quite valid) reasons for liking the movie, I will spoil at will.
There's no doubt Shyamalan was writing an allegory, but for me it didn't work for a number of reasons. First, he didn't stick cohesively to his intent. The movie at time resembles actual reality and at other times unreality. It centers around an Eastern bedtime story while at the same time
being the same story. It doesn't work because this central story is bizarrely untrue and pagan. The beings from the Blue World are innocent saviors of the poor, foolish humans, who fell because of their greed for property. Can anyone say "Rousseau?" The only way Paul Giamatti's character can learn the whole story is by appearing innocent and good himself. This directly reverses the Christian process, in which we come for help as desperately dirty and ragged as we truly are.
Second, who made them ask the little critic for his advice? He just wanted to be left alone! Why did he deserve to die because he answered when he was asked? Again, Shyamalan had that part exactly backward. I liked the critic because he was the oddity in this naive little story - he believed that there was no creativity left in the world, that all humanity was messed up. What do you know? He's right! This is why Ecclesiastes is my favorite book of the Bible: "Vanity, vanity, vanity... all is vanity... There is nothing new under the sun."
And the execution was terrible. Shyamalan likes things slow and dramatic. Sometimes that works. Sometimes not.
*grump* :D
I am all shaken up inside. I am spun around and turned upside down. I am also exhausted. This is all for the best of reasons. I had the incredible blessing last night to spend two hours sitting in a pub and discussing God and Christianity with some of my summer Frisbee teammates. I am still puzzling over the conversation. I couldn't seem to help myself. Every topic led me mentally straight back to Christianity, and then I started talking.
Pray for Marcus, Hilary, Jeff, and Mike - Marcus and Hilary especially. I think God is pursuing them. Events just fit together too much yesterday evening for it to be coincidence. And they both wanted to hear. They kept me talking. Marcus, my team captain, sat silently making direct eye contact. When I mentioned at one point that maybe I should change the subject now, he assured me that he didn't mind if I kept talking. Hilary, on the other hand, continually made the "that's
your truth" argument, but she was listening too. At the time I thought she didn't want to hear, but thinking back I realize the situation was quite the contrary. She was prolonging the topic, and she
wanted her arguments defeated.
I've been praying for my entire Frisbee team ever since I first met its members. I didn't remember last night that I had prayed for Hilary and Marcus specifically the week before, but I recalled it this morning. God answers prayer.
After I had shared the Gospel via my own experience as a sinner and had discussed the existence of absolute truth, the conversation revealed some interesting facts:
- Marcus normally rides his bike from his apartment in STL to the park where we all play Frisbee, five miles away. Hilary gave him and a bike a lift in her SUV to a pub in his neighborhood, and he decided to ride his bike down to his apartment a few blocks away and leave it there while Hilary and I went into the pub and waited. It turned out that in those few blocks, just before he walked back and joined us at our table, he had almost gotten into an accident. One of the first points I brought up, not knowing of his near miss, was the fact of our fragility as human beings, that it is important to think of our eternity now, since we don't know if any day will be our last here on Earth. No wonder he listened with such apparent shock!
- Hilary had heard the PHC students who spoke on NPR a few months ago, and she remembered them as articulate and sensible. She had also read only recently
All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot. Evidently, she had been thinking about Christianity.
- One of the major questions brought up was the contrast of Christianity and Islam. Thanks to my aborted attempt to take Modern Middle East History last year, in which I studied and memorized all the "wrong" items - the origins of Islam and its five pillars - for the midterm, I was able to answer! Also, I was able to mention truthfully that I had ordered the Koran off of Amazon for my upcoming History of Islam course, and that I planned to read it. I ordered my books for that course only last Saturday, two days before the conversation.
- Another major topic concerned the authenticity of Scripture. Only this past Sunday, the day before the conversation, I listened with avid interest to my pastor's Sunday School lesson concerning the process of canonization. This has also been one of my own consuming questions for two years now, requiring me to study what I can find in order to satisfy my own curiosity. I have wondered before why I felt compelled to study the topic, why I couldn't just accept its truth and move on. Now I know part of the reason. God was preparing me for this very time and place.
I left the pub at about 10:40 because I had to wake up at 6:30 this morning to help at the kids' drama camp my church is running this week. I didn't want to go, and I said so. The group didn't want me to go either, though we'd switched to discussing Frisbee for the previous fifteen minutes. When the waitress gave us the check, we'd spent half an hour getting everything ready to pay, because everyone was so wrapped up in what we were saying.
Where did the words come from? Why was I not scared? I was very much present in the moment, much more so than I am most of the time. But that wasn't really me talking. That was Someone more than me. I had to tell them the truth. I couldn't not.
I'm too tired to read back through this. I hope that it makes sense as is, and that it isn't too ungrammatical. Pray for these people. Pray that God's irresistable call is ringing in their ears. Pray for my true persistance and love. I'm driving to college in three weeks, but I want to tell my teammates that they can call me anytime, anywhere, if they need to talk. I want that to be true. I also want to invite them to church.
In other news, my pastor is awesome. My sister and I are joining the church we've been visiting for two years, a Presbyterian church. She is going away to college this fall as well, so our pastor and his wife expedited our new members class and invited us to their house this past Saturday morning, where they cooked us breakfast and discussed important theological points for four hours. They are such patient, loving, and wise people. Thanks to Pastor Stain, I finally know what I believe about election and the calling of the saints. PHC's Theology class gave me the key arguments of different positions, but confused me thoroughly. Pastor Stain answered all my questions, no matter how long it took (a talent that is so rare for me to find, and for which I am more grateful than I can say), and walked me through everything. This Sunday afternoon I will walk myself through it again.
The church drama camp has proceeded nicely for two days. I wasn't expecting that I would enjoy it very much before the kids arrived, but then I was enchanted. I am in co-charge of six lovely and precocious young ladies, ages six to nine.
- Gabrielle of the blue eyes and wide cat's smile is mischievous - she loves dancing, but hates to sing. So she doesn't sing. Unfortunately for her, the first hour of the day is all singing.
- Samantha is skinny and not very pretty, but you forget it when she smiles and shows her brilliant soul. She smiles often. She also wants to make kids happy who are shy, and she helps others as naturally as breathing. A leader if I ever saw one.
- Abby is freckled, red-headed, and unbelievably cute. She has one of the longest parts in the drama, but she came back with it almost entirely memorized after one day. Sometimes she looks patiently frustrated when we ask the group to do something together and she does it right the first time, but then we have to make our request easier because some of the other kids didn't get it.
- Sarah has huge, expressive eyes, but she doesn't smile as much as the others nor talk very much. When she tries to memorize her lines she remembers the meaning instead of the exact words. I took her away alone outside for ten minutes today to drill, and one time when she couldn't remember what to say she distracted herself by picking up a green walking stick (bug variety, not an actual stick) she saw on the ground.
- Calli is only six years old, and she doesn't talk much either. However, she reads better than almost all the others, and she also came back after one day with almost her entire (long) part memorized. She quietly does all we ask of her, and then adds some more of her own.
- Alyssa is an extremely pretty little girl, also six years old, who has much more trouble than the others with reading and singing. She only has two lines in the play, but she delivers them with a natural personality and gusto and makes me grin. :D
That's my current life. I really don't want summer to end, although I am also looking forward to the school year.
Hello world. I have some happy news. Just now I called PHC Student Life to ask if I was going to get a single-person room or not, and I hit the perfect window. Mr. Mason was laying out room assignments, and he called me back to ask me where I'd like to live. 8) So, guess where? I'll be in D3, in Natalie H.'s wing, straight across the hall from Em and Rachel P.! And yes, I have my single room! Hooray! I couldn't imagine a better room assignment for all my purposes, play-related, student-body political, and friend-wise. :D Thank you, Mr. Mason! Thank you God!
I shall dedicate the rest of this post as an ode to Dr. Hake.
I have never met anyone as centered on God as is Dr. Hake. Every discussion in class (sometimes to my frustration) returns inexorably to Christ and the Bible. Dr. Hake prays for us and corrects us. In short, he fathers us, something we displaced college students often need.
A few years ago Dr. Hake sent me a letter he gave his daughters when they went away to college. In it he recommends that his daughters set apart at least two hours a day for God. When I first read that I hardly understood. Two hours a day seemed an awful lot to spare for Bible reading and devotions. But then I realized what I was thinking - I couldn't spare two hours out of twenty-four for the Creator of the universe? I decided to treat my godly studies as another class - one in the matters of heavenly wisdom, to go along with earthly wisdom. Before long I found out that those two hours were a necessity, a wonderful blessing, not a duty. I found a deep heart relationship with God.
Dr. Hake's deep heart relationship with God is so evident. Every day, hot or cold, one can see the squinting, grey-bearded figure walking around Lake Bob and praying. He is always ready to welcome students into his office.
In class, Dr. Hake scarcely ever takes us where I would choose to go. Often the only thing is to let go and ride along. Sometimes we hardly touch the day's reading. But we always learn something, and we remember it.
I wish I appreciated Dr. Hake as much as he is worth.
All right, yesterday's post was seriously melodramatic. I wrote it 'cause I'm struggling to come to grips with some bits of life - namely, where is the balance between cynicism and the old self of blind faith? The old me said, "God can do anything He wants, and He has done amazing things with people all through history." The cynical me says, "People always mess everything up. America is doomed, because we won't do what we ought." Truth be told, I don't know if I can summon up enough love for "America" as a political nation to pray wholeheartedly that it be saved. That's why the melodrama. I've been trying to talk myself into feeling "right," because I'm almost convinced there's something wrong with me. Every good, solid American loves his country. Doesn't he?
Still, I don't want America to collapse, and I'm going to work hard to hold it together. In the words of Whittaker Chambers when he wrote
Witness, I feel like I'm working on the "losing side of history." I believe America is past its prime. We're not building a nation any more. We're merely conserving what we can of a nation that once existed.
I'm glad that's not the whole story. I know that our "loss is gain" so long as we serve Christ. No matter what, I know that everything all together will end well. America may live too, if God chooses to save it.
Here, then, is the balance between pessimism and optimism. I think America will die, but I work as though it will live. The problem is that I can't resolve this dilemma rationally. It resides at the point where faith and reason meet. Faith is reason's foundation, so I can't derive it. I just have to accept it. I have to understand that I don't understand. And at that, adieu for now.
Why am I here on this planet? What is my life's purpose? For what do I fight, and for what does PHC fight?
I fight for the freedom to shout God's truth from the rooftops in its fullest form, for the courage to shout, and for the words to use. This
is my work, and if I rejoice in it day by day I will be happy.
Of course, it's not that simple. I have to know God's truth first. And my part of the battle will probably involve quiet service, not the leading of mighty armies. Still, I expect at least a few of those vivid, life-changing moments. I've met some already - short, intense spiritual heights when God gave me strength of soul far beyond my normal ability.
It is entirely right to aspire to a godly ideal in a fallen world, so long as a person keeps one eye on the ideal and one eye on the world at all times. America can be changed, and it must be changed if it is to survive. But, God help me, I don't see how! Is the survival of America even the ideal?
No, the ideal is one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Strong, healthy families, with wide open spaces for children to play without fear of sexual predators. Churches that speak to each other and preach the whole Bible for sheer thankfulness to God, not for money. Schools organized by and accountable to parents, not to state or federal governments. A wise, loving people, full of desire to study God's creation and to use their own creative aspect to glorify Him. Oh Lord God, why can't it be this way?
So long as we say it can't, it never will.
What is this ennui that touches me as summer progresses? Several weeks swept by, and I was carelessly happy to work and play. Now I find my old restlessness again - an unwelcome companion.
Tonight I picked up my Bible and turned to Ecclesiastes. The familiar words struck more chords than ever before. I had spent an entire year praying to God every day for wisdom. Sure enough, the scales had slowly fallen off, culminating in the PHC disorder. I saw the world, and it was broken. "And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow."
Is it always worthwhile to want to
know? Solomon's answer is clear: "He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end. I know that there is no good in them, but for a man to rejoice and to do good in his life."
The answer, I'm beginning to understand, is deceptively simple. I can't know everything, and this is God's blessing. I don't have to. I can let go and let God be God.
Solomon was the wisest man in the world, but he didn't act on his own knowledge, and so he aged into the saddened author of Ecclesiastes. I feel the seeds of similar bitterness in myself, but I don't want to cultivate them. I want to let go.
Simple faith is so much more powerful than wisdom.
Certain people spend a lot of time at the Borders cafe. Their number includes me, I suppose. There's the old guy who never seems to leave. He takes books off the shelf and reads them as though the store is a library. Many people do that, actually, but few are as persistent as this man. Then there's another old guy who stops in occasionally between 6-8pm or so. He usually takes out a laptop and does something on it. I don't think he's writing. Perhaps a spreadsheet?
One chubby early-20s guy bustles in shortly after 5pm and sets up his laptop in one of the corners near a power outlet. He swiftly becomes immersed in his computer screen as he plays videogames over the wireless Internet. He never looks up, and he probably doesn't leave until closing time most days. I've only seen him leave once.
Various regular study groups and church Bible studies use the cafe to meet. One group of clean-cut, beautiful & handsome medical students was casually discussing the various methods of abortion a few weeks ago in the same way PHC study groups would prep for a Bio test. Abortion was to them just another medical fact to learn.
Last but not least, the creepy guy. I first mentioned him
back in February. He's an odd-looking fellow, about 6' tall and a little overweight, with a pockmarked face and glasses. I see him every few times I come in. He always hovers around the cafe area, walking restlessly or paging through magazines. Whenever I glance up, he's staring at me. If I make eye contact by mistake, he leers at me. I get the feeling he has no purpose for pacing or pretending to look at magazines. He's staring at me! Today I didn't see him come in, and it gave me quite a turn to glance up from my laptop and see him peering at me with an insolent look over the counter with the sweeteners and spoons. I packed up my laptop and left as soon as he had wandered into the books and out of sight.
A few months ago, a few of the Borders employees mentioned that they had needed to speak to the creepy man because he was following a few girls around the store and staring at them. I'm not sure if I should do something about him, or what that might be. He hasn't pestered me. He just looks and sometimes grins in an odd way. It seems ridiculous to leave my habitual writing spot because of his weirdness.
Makes me wish that I knew some big, friendly guys who would come study with me. My brothers won't come, 'cause they need to do homework on computer, and they don't have laptops. Ah well. I'll be driving east in a month anyway.
That reminds me. The rest of summer will have disappeared by the time I blink. July 24-27 I will be helping in the mornings at a kids' drama camp my church is running. July 28-30 I will be attending the
Homeschool Alumni National Reunion in Mount Vernon, MO. Ashlea D. will visit during the first week of August on the way back from Kansas. :) :) Then I drive east the week before I need to be at school, because my mom wants me to make a northern detour into New England with my younger brother so that he can visit a bunch of Ivy Leagues. Finally, I'll drop him with my grandparents in Boston so that he can fly back from there, and I'll head down to PHC for the August 18 check-in.
We're almost 2/3 through summer!
I haven't been posting as much these last few weeks because I haven't felt the necessity of communication the way I usually have in the past. There's plenty to occupy me around here. Also, various nice, long telephone conversations have satisfied me. I feel so loved when two different friends call me pretty much back-to-back, one for half an hour and the other for over an hour, and a third friend leaves me a voicemail in the meanwhile. :) I appreciate my friends so much!
I've regained my appetite for books. Whenever I'm first home from school, I can only read intellectual material - stuff that is Useful. In the last three weeks I've devoured at least ten fiction books. It feels like refueling; I can't get enough of it. Makes sense. If I don't have fiction flowing through my system, how can I spare any to create my own stories?
Less than a month and a half until PHC again. I'm starting to get nervous. Me? Nervous about PHC? Yes, well, I don't know much about the school year or how things will be. I don't know how I'll interact with some people. I don't know how I'll handle some of the old troubles I've had at PHC, and I don't know what new ones will arise. I don't know who I'm rooming with, or if I'm rooming alone. I don't know how (un)manageable my schedule will be. All I do know is that God loves me, and that He has an exciting, growing school year planned ahead for me.
Subject change. I saw
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest last night. It was a mixture of hilarious and strange, and I want to see it again sometime very soon. I'll wait 'til it's been out for a while to give a detailed review, because I don't want to spoil anything. For now I'll just say that it felt like one of the King's Quest games published by Sierra a while back. It contained all these separate plot areas, all wound together into one story. lol! I'm laughing now remembering it.
Actually, my oldest brother and I had tried to go to the 4:30pm showing at my favorite theater in the area. I figured it was pretty certain we should be able to get in, since that's the rush-hour show. However, we found when we arrived that all the shows for the rest of the day, even until 11:30pm, were already sold out! So we drove to a less-popular theater and managed to buy tickets for 10:15pm, which was the earliest show still available there. I'm guessing that P2 is having record weekend box-office sales. And from how much I liked it, I'll bet it hangs on just fine. It hit the perfect summer window, just when everyone was depressed from the lack of good movies, and just when we're not expecting anything else for a while. I'll be interested to see the weekend figures on Monday.
I have thought about a great many other things besides movies, but I don't especially feel like turning them into blog posts right now.
Ai. As I drove past the bank on the corner yesterday afternoon at 4:30pm, the blinking sign informed the world that it was 108 degrees out. That's how it felt. The car's air conditioner was doing its best, but no matter how hard it tried it could not produce cold air. So Maddy, Lillie, and I had opened all the windows as far as they would go. We had just finished driving four hours in this heat from Whiteman AFB, where the girls had spent a week for Civil Air Patrol summer encampment. I had also driven four hours in the morning on the first leg of the roundtrip. All our clothes were permanently fused to our bodies in a damp, sticky mass.
As we turned into our driveway, I noticed my phone blinking, so I listened to my voicemail. My brother's voice informed me that I needed to come home "right now." I raised my eyebrow. I'd been doing my best. So I walked into the house and told my brother: "I just got your message, and here I am."
I needed to go pick up Thing from the shop where he was getting a new leg. Saturday evening my sister, Mercy, and I had ridden him to the library and gone in to get our books. When we came out, I noted that he was listing to the left, but I thought it was 'cause I had parked him on a bit of a sideways incline. We dumped our books in the back seat, got in, and started to back out.
"WUBWUBWUB," said Thing worriedly as he wobbled backward.
"What in the world?" I started to ask, but just then I saw my left front hubcap slowly roll away from the front of the car. My mouth fell open. I eased back into the parking spot.
"WUBWUBWUB," said Thing with relief.
His left front tire was very, very flat. "Oh great, I guess we have to call home," I told Mercy. I reached for my purse. Halfway there, I realized I had left my cell phone charging at home. With a sinking feeling, I turned to Mercy. "Do you have your cell phone?"
"No, it's at home charging," she replied.
So I had to use the library pay phone. Thankfully, I got my dad instead of my mom. He told us to hang loose. We did. In twenty minutes the library closed and everyone drove away. Poor lonesome little Thing sat in the parking lot, crippled with his broken leg. Poor lonesome little us sat inside.
After a while, a tow truck turned in, populated by a nice, clean-cut man and his 14-year-old daughter. They attached a hook to Thing's lower lip and hauled him onto the truck bed. We tossed his hubcap into his back seat and squished into the truck cab with the towing man and his daughter.
I doubt I'll ever know for sure why we had a flat, but we did have an awfully nice conversation with the man and his daughter, Rachel. He had no accent, but Rachel sported a bit of a Hispanic sound. She tried to seem a little tough, but I could tell she was gentle, and she loved riding along with her dad. He let her fill out the paperwork and call in on the handheld radio. For some reason I felt my heart go out to her. Somehow I felt that she was at a vulnerable point in her life and needed help.
Anyway, we talked about St. Louis, homeschooling, and high school. I even got to mention that "Someone must have been looking out for us" in the way our tire popped - in a parking lot, not on the highway. Then we arrived, and there was my dad with our 15-passenger blue van. The towing man let down the back of the truck to make a ramp and backed poor Thing off. Before he and Rachel left, we made sure to tell them "Thank you!" I think we all felt that we had made new friends.
End of flashback. That was Saturday. Monday evening I picked Thing up just before the auto shop closed. His new leg worked just fine, but they couldn't tell me what had happened to the old one. A man at the library had said that he had heard a tire pop and expire somewhere in the parking lot, so most likely Thing's leg buckled and went while he was just sitting there. Was it the heat? A weak point on the tire? Sheer Providence? Who knows?
Happy Fourth of July everyone!
I am happy right now, and quite content with my life. I've been happy for several weeks now. Considering how miserable I was the first few months I was home, I am savoring my happiness for all it is worth. I suspect the following factors play a part:
- I am able to come back to PHC this fall, hopefully to finish my undergraduate degree at last!
- I will be helping Christy as she directs her play, so I will be useful this semester.
- I have only four classes this upcoming semester, along with six credits of more independent work.
- I am writing stories this summer for credit, and my paperwork for that is finally under control.
- I finished an 18-page story last week, meaning that I only have two credits of fiction to create during the month of July, some of which is already written.
- I was able to research and write two article for my work this past week and a half, instead of checking the prices and contact info for innumerable homeschool products.
- My family is doing well in all its pursuits.
- It is summertime, which means sleeveless shirts, flip-flops, sun, and swimming.
- I can run without my knee clicking!
- I have sold 70 graphic novels on Amazon in less than three weeks, which is helping my college fund a little bit.
- Days are passing quickly.
- I have caught up to myself and how I changed during the stressful months while I was working on my history project.
- I am content as a single, completely unattached human female.
- My family loves me.
And last, but certainly the most important:
- God. He's done something to me, and I like it.
