Imagine Me.

I'm learning to breathe
I'm learning to crawl
I'm finding that You and You alone can break my fall

It's a weird feeling to be so filled with joy and guilt at the same time. To want to run and to stop at the same time.

I don't know if you've ever had those moments when God has made it so blatantly clear to you what He wants you to realize. I'm not sure if I'm having one of those moments, but heck, I haven't written in a while and I find that I forget things so easily if I don't write them down.

I had my fall break this past weekend, and I don't think it could have come at a better time. My parents and I had decided a while back that it wasn't worth the 100-some dollars to fly back home two times in two months, but man, it would have been so nice to come home. It startles me a little sometimes when I accidentally call my Emory dorm room "home," and I just stop and think for a second if it really is home yet. I don't think it is.
With everyone gone for break, campus was basically like a ghost town. But somehow, the whole end of my hall ended up staying on campus, and I must say that spending fall break with them was really incredible.
Yes, we did nothing at all. Yes, we watched The Notebook twice and bawled both times. Yes, we got fat on our junk food and cereal from Publix since the freaking DUC wasn't open all break. Yes, we acted ridiculous and had dance parties to bad music and made complete fools of ourselves. Yes, we didn't do half of the homework that we promised to ourselves that we would. But oh, what a feeling it is to do absolutely nothing but bond with the girls on my floor and feel absolutely no guilt for "wasting time." To wake up so confused after a 4 hour nap to see darkness outside and to just guffaw with my roommate Liz because we slept until 7pm. To have lunch and dinner dates with the cutest little Jewish girl Kala who might as well be Asian with us (shes' going to have better Chinese than me someday) and laugh as we try to rationalize the millions of calories that we're eating.

I have never felt so at peace, so rested, so filled since the day I got here. Thank God for rest.

Just at the time I feel that I'm at peace with the world that's mine
I feel at ease, I feel at home, and I know I'm not alone
But in my rest, there comes a test, that shakes me 'til again I know
That what I am is not enough, and again I've got to grow

I got a very unexpected phone call a few days ago from an adult that I've never spoken to on the phone before. He had called mostly to check up on me and to see how I was doing, but asked me some piercing questions and perhaps unknowingly helped me to remember some very important things about myself. I spoke about Camp Heaven for the first time in a long time, and it broke my heart how easily I've forgotten about something that had been and still is so important to me.

I hate that about myself. I am so affected by my surroundings, and it's so easy for me to adapt to a new environment and almost completely forget about the old one. It's been hard coming from one of the most broken neighborhoods in inner-city D.C. to a brand-new dorm at Emory, surrounded by people that will probably never hear a gunshot their entire lives. It's been hard coming from dino-nuggets and processed Costco food for dinner to a $58 lunch at a Thai restaurant where you have a freaking DRESS CODE and waiters who will fold your napkin and place it in your lap for you.

And I've forgotten. I'm so ashamed to say that I've forgotten.

I ran to Lullwater Park today and just sat by the water and tried to remember this past summer, to remember Little Lights. It broke my heart when I tried to remember all of my girls names that I couldn't for the life of me remember two of the girl's names. It broke my heart that it's only every now and then that I remember to pray for them by name and to remember that some of them will fall into sexual sin earlier than they ever should, that many just hunger for attention and find it in the wrong places. I was so angry with myself that I never did send out letters to them letting them know that I hadn't forgotten about them and that I didn't want to be one of those people that just come into their live and leave as suddenly as they had come.

Jeremy had asked me a few weeks ago if I ever got to process Little Lights and think through what those 7 weeks in D.C. had been. The truth was that I hadn't, that I had gotten sucked into the college life almost instantly, that I hadn't even given it much thought. One thing that he said that really stuck with me was how much of what we do in college in for ourselves. At Little Lights, everything we did was to pour ourselves out for others. The planning I did was for my girls, I had to get rest so that I wouldn't be a zombie for my kids, we tried our best to love on these children even when it wasn't reciprocated. I've never met people who were so eager to serve, to grab all the dirty dishes and start washing them, to have dinner ready at 7 for the other counselors that were exhausted from their camp day, who would lug a mattress up the stairs so that I wouldn't have to keep bringing up the sofa cushions every night.
But everything I'm doing here at Emory is for myself. I'm studying hard so I can get a degree and a good job and money. I go to the gym everyday so that I can feel better about myself. I take forever to respond to things and to keep in touch with people from home because I am lazy and too busy/tired from doing all these things for myself that I think that I can respond another day. And if I haven't already struggled with my own selfishness, you can bet that it's only worse here.

Lord, help me- that I will learn what it means to live unselfishly, to love people simply because Jesus loves them and not because I want something from them. That I will learn to remember who I am and where I come from. That I will not fall into the trap of being lukewarm, that I will have the longing to long after You.

O God, I have tasted Thy goodness, and it has both satisfied me and made me thirsty for more. I am painfully conscious of my need of further grace. I am ashamed of my lack of desire. O God, the Triune God, I want to want Thee; I long to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty still. Show me Thy glory, I pray Thee, that so I may know Thee indeed. Begin in mercy a new work of love within me. Say to my soul, `Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.' Then give me grace to rise and follow Thee up from this misty lowland where I have wandered so long. 

In Jesus' name, Amen.

--The Pursuit of God, A.W. Tozer

College is difficult.

I haven't touched this in quite a while, but every now and then I need to vent and cry online. Not really, but maybe this will help. Please bear with me as I have a personal pity party. It's gonna be a blast especially with that awesome alliteration going on right there. And right there, too. I'll shut up.

I suppose the reason that I'm writing today is to share a personal epiphany - for I am discovering quickly and painfully that I am really kind of dumb. In high school, I was no genius but I got by with pretty decent grades and could easily cram and do well and impress Gloriann with my decent grammar and sentence structure. I actually used to be a pretty smart child up until middle school because reading was my favorite pasttime and my mom would actually threaten to punish me if I didn't stop reading. The one thing I'll make sure to do to my kids is to make sure they're nerdy little bookworms. Anyways. As I grew older, I stopped reading, I stopped knowing what was going on and those that knew me well enough knew that I probably didn't really learn the material until the night before. And after the test, the knowledge just whooshed out of my brain. Yet I could somehow trick people into thinking I was smart because I averaged out a 4.0 every year in high school, whoop dee doo. 

Well, now I'm screwed. I had my first real college test last week - a Chem 141 exam with Professor Morkin (who is an amazing professor but the hardest out of the 3 chem teachers) - and I had studied all week for it. And I actually felt really good when I left that test, and kind of assumed that I'd get a B, maybe a C at worst. Then she sends us the answer key a day after and I'm like WHAT THE FREAK I FAILED THAT JUNK. It was the first page that completely killed me - somehow I screwed up ionization energies and got like freaking 6 out of the 23 points on that page because of this chart that had like 3 pts for each little blank and I just botched it up like mad. All the other pages were fine, but yeah I basically failed because of that page. And the part that drives me crazy is that I could have easily gotten an A on that if I were more careful or just less stupid in the head. I don't think I've ever felt so dejected or insecure about my studies, and even though I know this is a hard class, I know I can do better. Haha well at least I basically know that I'm not meant to be pre-med. I probably won't get an A unless I get an A on everything from here on out, which I highly doubt I can do. OH COLLEGE, WHY DO I SUCK AT THEE. Have mercy on me. 

Man, I wish I could just be a good student. One that takes good notes instead of copying down every little thing, one that knows what's going on in class and can help other people too instead of being a burden to them. There are so many people here that I look at and I'm just like wow, these people know what they're doing, they have such good habits and know how to learn. And I just wonder why I'm nothing close to that. 

The only things here that I have had any success in doing is singing and editing other people's English papers. Sigh yai yai. 

I can only hope that I can someday be one of those people here at Emory, that I will be stretched and challenged so much here that I can't help but grow. The transition here has been difficult, I have yet to learn how to manage my time and study what matters. 

I miss ya'll back at home. I know that I've absolutely sucked at keeping in touch, things have been hectic and they're only going to get more hectic. 

Sometime next week I'll update you guys about the workstudy job that my roommate Liz and I are doing called Jumpstart. The inner-city preschool kids that we're working with are absolutely adorable and remind me of Little Lights kids so much.

Time to destroy this to-do list, and learn how to learn. 

Please pray for me. 

Inadequacy is quite humbling.