Bits & Pieces

I have a new article up on the Bloom! blog – perhaps you can relate?

“I’m such a talker. 

I can talk about anything, write about anything, and read about anything.  Sometimes, I can even make it sound like I know what I’m talking about.  But sometimes, I hide behind my words.  I’m so busy reading, writing, and talking about something that I’m not actually living it.

And I find that I’m often approaching God this way.  I want to learn all about Him, I want to soak up the rich nuggets of wisdom from others, I want to share what I’m learning.  I read good, classic Christian books, subscribe to the blogs of people I admire and respect, and sometimes parrot these lessons and thoughts about God back out in my writing and conversations.

And none of this is bad, of course.  But all I’m doing is running in a circle around God.  I learn all about others’ views of God, I talk about my own, and I just keep running, running, running.”

Click here to continue reading A Circle of Words.

~

In other news, bits and pieces of my last few days include

 - hearing Dean Brady speak at Navs on being a Christian in an intellectual, academic (and hostile!) world.  It was so good.

 - going out to Eatin’ Park afterwards with some friends and ordering breakfast at 12:30 a.m.

 - getting all excited for the Ohio State White-Out game.  (which we painfully lost)

 - beginning a week of dance rehearsals for the performance next Sunday

 - having a lot of writing to do and wishing I could avoid it

 - seeing the daycare kids trotting around campus, which always makes me smile

 - counting down until Thanksgiving break

 - finally realizing how helpful calenders/planners are

What have you been up to?

A Chance to Die

I’ve never really been into biographies.  I don’t know why; perhaps they were just not as engaging as the Boxcar Children.  But my tastes have been changing a bit over the last few years, and I’m reading a lot more biographies and memoirs.

I just bought A Chance to Die: The Life and Legacy of Amy Charmichael, by Elisabeth Elliot, and all of the sudden I’m understanding the value of such books. 

I don’t know about you, but Amy Charmichael is definitely a name I’m familiar with.  Maybe too familiar.  I hear her name and immediately put her in the “spiritual giant” category.  You know, the that’s amazing but she was someone special box.  I look at her life, and I look at mine: I’m just a regular girl, who loves her Lord and wants to spend her life glorifying Him – and is awfully scared about some things, with a very small, very tenacious bit of trust and faith.  Not the kind of woman who takes her life in her hands by storming into temples and rescuing children.  Yeah, not in Amy’s league at all. 

But we read, over and over again in the Bible, how Jesus used and blessed and worked with people.  Real people.  Ordinary people.  Who were scared to completely obey God.  Moses stuttered; Esther was a poor girl who was supposed to stand up to the king, and Mary forfeited her reputation and the life she had planned to mother God’s Son.  And Amy Charmichael?  Just another ordinary girl, with ordinary problems and troubles and fears and worries, who submitted and surrendered herself to God’s will. 

She was real, she was human, and she was a sinner – just like me.  She was not immune to the worries of placing everything in One who we can only trust will come through.  I love a story that took place when she was a missionary in Japan (before India), and she heard of a man possessed by six demons.  She prayed for God’s favor in casting them out, she fasted, and then she took a huge leap of faith and tried it.  “She told the crowd in the room that her mighty Lord Jesus could cast out the six spirits.  At the name of Christ a fearful paroxysm took hold of the man, hellish power was loosed, and blasphemies which even she could recognize as blasphemies poured from the man’s mouth.  He struggled, was forcibly held down, the women knelt and prayed, the struggle increased.  Satan seemed to be mocking them.  ‘Can you think how I felt then?’ Amy wrote.  ‘The Lord’s name dishonored among the heathen, and I had done it!  Far, far better never to have come!’”

Have you ever had an experience where you could do something that would require a huge leap of faith, but were paralyzed by worry over whether or not God would actually come through – whether you were understanding him correctly, whether you would look like a fool, whether people would just laugh because no mighty miracle occurred?  I can’t put my finger on an exact situation, but I know I’ve had this feeling many times. 

And it’s just so encouraging to realize that Amy was a girl just like me.  She was scared and embarrassed, but she didn’t let that stop her.  And God used her mightily, as we know.  (In the above story, the demons were cast out, and the man and his wife turned to Jesus). 

I find even more parallels with my life right now.  In one letter home, Amy wrote of how her heart broke when she drove past a wild Japanese party worshipping different spirits, how horrible it was to see the brokenness and emptiness so displayed.  And her description really doesn’t sound that different from a typical weekend here.  People go out, celebrate nothing, try to drink away their problems, dance like crazy, and do inappropriate things.  There’s such pain and emptiness hiding behind that wild abandon. 

I’m not called to India.  At least, not right now.  But I am called to live and work and love right here, in college. 

And it’s my prayer that I may be as obedient as Amy, as willing to put my emotions and fears aside, choosing instead to trust.

Adventures of All Hallow’s Eve

First of all, now that Halloween is officially so yesterday, it’s the Christmas season.  Welcome to the most wonderful time of the year!  Turn those speakers up!

I haven’t actually listened to Christmas music yet, but I’ve sure been singing it.  And my roomie’s resolve to wait until Thanksgiving has been worn down quite a bit, due to the aforementioned early snowfall and the fact that she wanted to watch Beauty and the Beast but found the Beauty and the Beast Enchanted Christmas videotape inside the box instead.  So she watched that instead, all of her own accord.  And is feeling slightly more Christmas-y. 

But back to yesterday’s events?

I haven’t done anything for Halloween for the last ten years or so; I don’t particularly celebrate it (beyond pumpkin carving!), but Navs and Cru were having fun events and I so wanted to dress up.  And my darling friend mailed me a costume, so of course I was going to dress up and wear it.  So I was very much looking forward to the day’s events.

I think Halloween on campus officially started on Thursday; the dining halls went all out in creepy decorations and Halloween-named dishes and spooky music and sound effects (which were actually laughable).  I was laughing that I was short and so could walk under all these hanging and swinging things while all the guys had to practically limbo with their trays to navigate the hall – and then I almost screamed at the stuffed owl glaring at me from above the silverware stack. 

Whatever. 

I did laugh, though, when their version of “spooky music” was the ’60s “The Monster Mash”.  hehe! 

Friday was a usual Navigators meeting, although there was a costume contest.  People were very creative – three sophomores dressed as a shower caddy, with one being a razor, another a loofah, and a third bubbles; four sophomore girls dressed as the sophomore guys, with the result that two of those dressed as the girls; we had a banana in pajamas and Hermione and kids-on-a-rope.  (The on-campus daycare takes its kids everywhere by having them all hang onto a jump rope.  It’s adorable). 

And of course, the two MCs dressed as Kanye West and Taylor Swift.  It was pretty funny. 

After Navs, I agreed to go with a friend to a haunted house put on by the forensic science department; she’d been there the night before and promised me it wouldn’t be too creepy.  (I refused to go to the one put on by the theater department.  I might not have been able to sleep for days).  This one was funny; I spent the whole time laughing or screaming.  The “guide” talked so fast I missed the “scary” scenario (I think we were at a mental institute and a serial killer was on the loose, but I missed most of that, which made it significantly less scary), and I pushed Megan through the door first, since she’d been there before.  So whenever she screamed, I had a two-second warning that something was going to jump at me.  Like I said, I was laughing pretty much the whole time; and I was never scared, only startled.  Regardless, I screamed a full thirty seconds every time someone jumped at me. 

Saturday, Kelly and I were supposed to go to brunch in costume with two other girls, but they all bailed on me with the result that only I was dressed up for brunch.  Oh well.  Then last night I spent a long time making Kelly’s Tinkerbell costume; I’m very proud of it (both my idea and handiwork, thank you very much!)  It’s amazing what wrapping paper and tape can do. 

Then we went to the Cru party, which was pretty much a dance party, and it was fun.  Once we came back, still very much in my Disney mood, I pulled Kelly downstairs to the “sound-proof” practice piano rooms and sang out of my new Disney songbook.  And then we came back and gloried in the extra hour of life that we were going to use well in sleep.

And what was I?  Only my very favorite princess ever.

I’ve already done Cinderella, you see:

So this time…

With a dreamy, far-off look, and her nose stuck in a book: what a puzzle to the rest of us is Belle!

Disney never gets old.

Merry Christmas!

Last night I…

said “this is so cool” about fifty million times.

You see, last night was the Karl Rove/Howard Dean debate over healthcare.  The one that I got up early for VIP tickets for.  And I wound up sitting in the center of the front row. 

And the moderators asked a question I submitted; Rove enthusiastically said I was exactly right and then, after I met him at the reception, proceeded to call me “Megan who asked my favorite question” for the rest of the night.

Really, it doesn’t get much better than that. 

The debate itself was quite fun.  I guess I wasn’t sure what to expect – maybe something like the Oxford-style debate held earlier this year, with a panel of student and professors who debated the government bailouts.  I was a little worried that I wouldn’t follow everything, because I’ve been kind of lazy when it comes to researching the whole healthcare bill and hype and reform.

I didn’t need to be worried.

First, the debate was awesome and highly entertaining.  Secondly, it was more of a show than an actual informative event: they didn’t really explain what all is exactly in the bill; Rove just kept repeating that we shouldn’t turn the entire system on its head and duplicate the (broken and failing) Medicare system for the whole population; I’m not even sure what Dean’s points were: he seemed to get off-topic sometimes.  He kept pointing to the healthcare reforms instituted in Vermont (where he was previously governor) and saying how well they worked, but never quite responding to Rove’s pointed criticisms.

In general, Karl Rove spouted statistics and hard facts and figures; Howard Dean kept claiming those stats to be false but never actually backed that up with his own figures.  He was more passionate, though, and also didn’t seem to realize it was a healthcare debate. (He asked during the debate if there were any questions that did not pertain to health care – and suggested he really wanted to talk about climate control – and apparently asked the same question about four times before the debate began).  But those two are really quite funny together – they’ve done this before, they know exactly how the other is going to respond.  Dean repeatedly interrupted Rove; sometimes the two would have a civil shouting match and entirely ignore the moderators.  At on point, when the validity of his statistics was called into question, Rove promised to publish the poll in his next column for the Wall Street Journal, which Dean insisted he hadn’t read for twenty years.  They picked this back up at the very end of the VIP reception, in the middle of picture-taking – it was a sort of “smile, smile, insult, smile, insult” thing going on that was quite funny.  (“People only read the WSJ to confirm their own biases!  I haven’t read the opinion pages for twenty years!” claims Dean, while Rove fires back, “Oh, but you have read the Journal because you’ve written letters to the editor!”)

I think they were having fun.

I know I certainly was! 

And if you still want proof – well, here’s a blurry cell phone picture:

                                                                                                          Karl Rove and yours truly!

And happily, I was sitting next to Anthony, who also repeated “This is so cool!” about fifty million times, so I didn’t feel stupid.

And in other news, today is my baby girl’s fourth birthday.  Except, of course she’s not a baby any more (as she will emphatically tell me whenever I slip).  I can’t even imagine how different our lives would be without her – happy birthday to my sunshine of a sister!  I still remember how excited I was as Katie and I took turns calling everyone we knew from the hospital with the news that it was a girl.  Everyone was happy, and oohed and aahhhed, but only my twin Mellie responded with the enthusiasm I thought appropriate: screaming on the other end of the phone. 

Happy birthday to that reading and dancing little girl out there!  I know she’s twirling around and eating cake and generally having a ball.

wishes & love,

Megan

Things that made me smile today

I’m thinking that these posts should be a Monday tradition.  Because, you know, it’s Monday, and sometimes we just need a little cheer.

Although today was simply fantastic.

First, I was excited for breakfast, because I needed to get a fruit fix after a weekend away that was super fun but sadly lacking in the fruit department.  Good start to the day.

Then I only had one class.

Then I spent some good time with a staff member from Cru, just talking and sharing and learning.

Then I had a fun lunch with some people from Navs.

Then I came back a took a really long nap.  By accident.  But it was good.

And the one thing that really made me smile and possibly made my year was getting a package from my friend.  You see, Mellie and I are quite a pair; we have zany ideas and do ridiculous things together.  And I really, really wanted to wear a certain dress as my Halloween costume, and she had made it, and she went to all the trouble of mailing it to me just so I could dress up and be one happy little camper.  After I dragged myself out of bed from my nap, and sleepily checked my email, I woke up in the space of about a nanosecond when I saw an email from Housing that I had a new package.  I ran outside, across the street, into Simmons, and practically flew back to my room to open it and try it on.

Then Kelly and I and Rachel went to RigaTony’s for dinner, an awesome little Italian dining hall.  And we got there right before the line.  And it was fabulous.

And then we had a Bible-study hang-out with all the girls and guys freshmen Bible studies on South; we watched It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown and drank apple cider and played Taboo and generally had a blast.

And I don’t have a whole lot of work left to do tonight.

And I got a letter today.

And I don’t have any papers or tests due this week, and I have fun stuff planned for every single night.  (Tomorrow: Howard Dean/Karl Rove debate; Wednesday: Bible study; Thursday: Cru; Friday: Navs in costume; Saturday: Cru Halloween party…)

Yup.  This is a very smiley day, and it looks like one smiley week.

love & fun,

Megan

Thoughts

My thoughts control my life. 

I’ve always sort of known that, but I’ve been thinking about it more and more lately.  (Does it sound strange to say that I’m thinking about what I’m thinking about?)  Thoughts become words, and words become actions. 

I was talking with my dad the other day about how I’m realizing that I am very ineffectual at changing my own life.  I can’t change my heart, as much as I want to; I can’t change the things I want to change – like my pride – through sheer determination.  I must be continually going back to the foot of the cross, acknowledging that I can’t do anything on my own, but embracing the work God is doing in my life, and letting Him do everything.

And all that is very, very true.  But my dad offered this piece of wisdom in addition:

“You’re right, you can’t change your heart on your own,” he said, “but you can’t forget the one thing you can change: your thoughts.  We’re the only creatures that can specifically choose what to think about and dwell on.  The more you dwell on things that honor God, the more you are drawing close to Him and the more He can work in your life.” 

That never occurred to me before, but it makes sense.  After all, the more I think about things that don’t honor God, the more I’ll focus my life around those things, and the farther I’ll drift.  But the more I ask him to help me focus on things that are pleasing and honoring, the more I’ll draw near.

And then I realized that the Bible also has a lot to say on this – from Philippians 4:8 (“Whatever is true, whatever is noble…right…pure…think on these things”), 2 Corinthians 5:10 (“We take captive every thought that sets itself up against the knowledge of God”), and Romans 12:2 (“Don’t copy the behaviors and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think”), for a start. 

Clearly, God cares about my thoughts.

The question is, do I?  Does it even occur to me that I should be monitoring the kinds of thoughts that I allow into my mind, the ones that I’m dwelling on and meditating on?  I don’t think we can control the thoughts that pop into our minds, but we can decide whether to keep thinking about them or immediately hand it over to God and redirect our thoughts in a better direction. 

But it’s hard.  Because I often forget, or flat-out want to think about those tempting things.  And yet, the more God brings it to my mind to pay attention, and be conscious of what I’m dwelling on, the easier it is to redirect my thoughts.

I’m just learning about this road – I’m not far along at all.  I just discovered it.  But I do know that being careful with my thoughts is helping me on the gratefulness scale.  And it’s helping me maintain my emotional purity.  I’m just a very emotionally-wired girl, like everyone else, perhaps, but that means I need to be especially careful when my mind takes off and is imagining five years down the road.  It’s hard to guard my heart when I’m always jumping ahead to fantasy land!

And these are the thoughts jumping around in my head this Tuesday night.  In terms of college news, you should be happy to hear that the snow melted, it’s 60 degrees, and I was carving pumpkins and listening to Christmas music at the same time on Sunday.  And I have less than a month until Thanksgiving break, and I’m trying to concoct a costume for Halloween.  Because I haven’t dressed up in about ten years, and I kinda want to be Belle for the Cru (or Navs) party.  We’ll see.

Now I should study, hmmm?

grace & peace,

Megan

Baby, it’s cold outside

This is what fall is supposed to be.  And this is what it was, say, a week ago.

Want to see what it is now?

We are, literally, walking in a winter wonderland.  Oh, right, but it’s not winter yet.

Some people are exuberant over this snowfall.  Some are crestfallen.  Some, like me, are simply confused.  Is it or is it not October 16?  We’ve been warned – by the newspaper, even! – to be careful of trees because they are heavier than usual, with so much snow catching on the leaves.  Snow and leaves don’t go together too well in my mind.

Obviously, I am not the one who determines the proper time for snowfall.  

But it is kind of funny, with this being homecoming week and everything and people running around doing fall-related things, to have this whiteness covering the ground.  In fact, it was so icky that Paternoville campers were sent home.  (Paternoville, for the uninitiated, is the process of camping out in tents outside the stadium for good seats).  Happily, the campers were awarded their seats anyway. 

I marched into the dining hall and greeted the card-swiper guy with, “Is it Christmas yet?”

Seriously, we’re all ready for it with this snow.  I see holly and ivy bushes with snow on them, and nothing looks more Christmasy.  The snow has even worn down my roomie’s resolve; she’s singing bits of appropriate Christmas songs with me in our room. 

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow – but not on the homecoming parade.  Or the football game.

On the bright side, I had my first snow day today!  I have one class on Fridays, at 10:10, but I get up at 8 to feel ready for the day and have breakfast with Kelly (she has a 9 am class.  We’re looking forward to next semester, when we both only have 10:10s!).  In line was one of the guys from my English class. 

“Hey Megan, did you get the email?”

Umm, no.  (Are you kidding?  I haven’t checked it yet).  “What email?”

“Class is cancelled today!”

“Really?”  My voice probably went up two octaves with excitement and surprise.

“He’s kidding you,” a random guy next to me warned, presumably one of my classmate’s friends.

Being the gullible person I am, I’m not sure who is kidding me.  But Dan’s claim seemed legit.  “Family emergency, she emailed this morning.”

So I go back and check my email, and yup, no class today!  So I go back to bed.  And putter around and curl my hair and have lunch and write on this blog and maybe, maybe do a teensy bit of homework before the homecoming parade and (yay!) Navs tonight.

“Although, I think I need to be more careful with my wishes,” I told Kelly earlier.  “I wished for a snow day yesterday.  But I forgot to wish for a snow day for everyone, because now everyone still has classes but I have no one to play with me!” 

Such is life.  I’m enjoying it anyway!

(in the interest of full disclosure, I did not take any of these pictures.  In fact, I stole them from my friends.  Laura and Ericka’s facebooks and Dean Brady’s flickr page.  Shhhhh).

Sonia Nazario

In keeping with my intention to take advantage of all college’s opportunities, I woke up this morning at 7:30.  Half-asleep, I yanked on jeans and a sweater and went down to the offices a few floors below my room.

I didn’t think there would be anyone else there. 

“You’re number fourteen,” I was told, upon noticing several sleepy sweatshirt-clad kids slumped against the wall.  One guy had claimed an armchair and was cuddling his pillow. 

And I was okay with that.  There were twenty-three tickets.  For what, you ask?  Well, eighteen of us woke up insanely early to claim VIP tickets to a debate between Karl Rove and Howard Dean on healthcare.  Naturally, it’s a topic that I know absolutely nothing about, but it should be fascinating.  And the VIP ticket lets me sit in the front row and meet them afterwards.  Pretty cool, if you ask me!  I don’t know what everyone else did, but I clutched my ticket, went back upstairs, changed into my pajamas, and went back to bed.  I also hit the snooze button about three times, and barely made it to breakfast before it closed. 

But the real point of this entry is to talk about the lecture I just attended, by Sonia Nazario of the LA Times.  A friend in a journalism class told me about it, and asked what I thought I’d learn/she’d talk about. 

Ummm – the usual?  Tips on writing, the future of journalism and newspapers?

Not really.  She talked about her story, her passion, and her work.  And if you want an example of a real journalist, with a capital J, look no farther.  This is a woman who digs into the real and the ugly to find the truth and bring change.  This is a woman who has actually risked her life to make people see and understand and help.  Her Pulitzer Prize is well deserved.

I will have to look her up and discover all of her other work, but we spent much of the time discussing her work Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with his Mother.

It’s a story of immigrants.  The much, much too common story of a mother who is driven to desperation and must weight the costs: should she stay with her children so they can be together, and watch them eat only one a day – if that – and never progress past third grade?  They’ll never better themselves or live a very good life.  So, heart breaking, Lourdes chooses to make the dangerous journey to America, in hopes that she’ll be able to send money home so her kids can at least eat and learn. 

But Enrique doesn’t understand.  He’s five when she leaves.  And she never comes back.  At sixteen, he decides to embark on the most dangerous trip of his life: clinging to the bandit-controlled tops of freight trains through the border of Mexico, then slipping into America to find her and find out if she still loves him.  As Nazario writes, “Many, including Enrique, begin to idealize their mothers.  In their absence, these mothers become larger than life.  Although these women struggle ot pay rent and eat in the United States, in the imaginations of their children back home they become deliverance itself, the answer to every problem.  Finding them becomes the quest for the Holy Grail.” 

There is a very good chance Enrique won’t survive; he gets beaten and robbed and stripped of the precious piece of paper with his mother’s phone number.  He is half-starved.  And I only read an excerpt; I don’t know what else this poor kid goes through to find his mother. 

Happily, he eventually does.  But after the joyous reunion, he still has to live with eleven years of resentment wondering why she never came back.  He’s struggling now with his drug addiction that he began in Honduras.

The problems are real.  The problems of little ones clinging to trains and trying to dodge corrupt police, bandits, and robbers are horrible.  And Nazario herself decided to spend three months clinging to trains, retracing the exact route, researching and getting details so she could craft a story that would bring awareness to this problem. 

I don’t think I could ever put myself in that kind of dangerous position.  (She actually retraced the journey twice – once for the newspaper series, and again when it was being turned into a book.  But she didn’t ride the trains the second time – her husband told her she wouldn’t have to worry about being killed by bandits again.  “I’ll finish you off first.”  She compromised; no more train-riding or walking through snake-infested deserts in the dark).  But that passion to do your best, to find the truth, even if it’s ugly, to help and to change – that is what I find so amazing and so inspiring.  It was a fascinating talk.

And now, this blog post has taken about an hour and a half to write.  Kelly and I were watching Aladdin most of the time, because it was on the Disney Channel and we don’t have it and have been wanting to watch it for quite a while.  It was so good.

We regret nothing.

The wheels on the bus

go round and round.  When they work, that is. 

Riding home in the bus yesterday, I alternated between listening to my iPod, doing bits of schoolwork, overhearing conversation, and watching random pieces of the Spiderman movie on a tiny screen above my head.  (I’ve never seen anything Spiderman, but I still found it amusing to watch people in strange costumes smashing through things).  You know, the usual bus trip. 

Two hours into it, I started getting excited that we only had an hour to go.  I also started attempting to study for my psych exam, which is what I was supposed to be doing for the other two hours.  So I’m merrily reading my study guide, not paying much attention to it, when all of the sudden we’re bouncing along and then we’ve stopped.  Along the turnpike. 

“This can’t be good,” everyone says, and then turns to their neighbor in hopes they have x-ray vision or prediction powers.  “Do you know what’s going on?” 

No one did. 

We sit in the bus, quietly speculating, for about ten minutes, until I realize that the bus driver hasn’t bothered to tell us what’s going on because he’s actually outside of the bus.  Five minutes later he walks back on and about ten people ask, “Could you please tell us what’s going on?”

“The engine overheated.  We have to wait for them to send coolant.  If that doesn’t work, they’ll have to send another bus.” 

At this point, I was both calm and fine and felt like crying.  Who wants to wait another hour for the coolant (though I slipped and told Katie we were waiting for Kool-Aid), and then another two hours after they realize that hasn’t worked for a bus to be sent out from State College?  We were only an hour away. 

Fingers flew as people began texting or calling the news back to the people waiting for them.  “My plans are so ruined,” one girl wailed.  “So much for taking the early bus!”

And they turned Spiderman off.

And the air conditioning.

And then they turned the air conditioner, and thus the engine, back on.  Which was confusing.  Some brave kids decided to leave the bus and scope out what was going back on. 

“He says there’s actually coolant in the bus, so he thinks it’s an electrical problem, not the engine overheating.  But they won’t let him go, so we still have to wait for the coolant, and then they’ll discover that won’t work, and then they’ll call for a bus,” the guys reported.

Swell.

We relay the news to our friends and settle down for a long wait.  I attempt to be productive on said psychology study guide.  About five minutes later, the mechanic shows up, and we cheer happily.  We’ve only been waiting half an hour!

Fifteen minutes later, we notice a bus has pulled up beside ours.  Everyone is startled; we expected that they hadn’t even called one yet.  Turns out it only came an hour, from Harrisburg, but we are still beside ourselves with excitement in getting out of this bus and back on the road.  We grab our bags and switch buses.

I’ve just sat down next to a new girl and discovered that she lives on my hall when they call us out of the new bus and back into the old one. 

This is confusing.

Apparently, the replacement bus didn’t have enough seats for us all.  And apparently, the old bus is now safe to ride.

We cross our fingers and hope for the best. 

And thankfully, nothing else happens.  It only delayed us an hour or so, which is still better than the four hours we were expecting to sit in the cramped bus.

And I was greeted by a little girl with flying hair, as she managed to jump and run at the same time.  It was the cutest thing I have ever seen. 

May your weekend be equally adventurous! 

grace & peace,

Megan

P.S. Roomie knows me so well.  I sent her a text to both check on her and complain that my bus had broken down.  (She was going home as well, but unfortunately caught whatever strange sickness I had, so she spent Thursday and Friday feeling dizzy and I was worried that things might not be well on her bus and train.)  She texted back with, “At least you have a story to tell!”

How true.

words

Back at home, I have a little penguin sticky note taped to my mirror bearing three words.

Intentional.

Embrace.

Enchant.

Know how those words are related?  It was part of an idea for the new year – the “little word 2009″.  Pick one word to characterize the way you want to live the new year. 

Knowing me, I picked three.

I still think those are pretty awesome words.  And now I think I need to put a Belle sticky on my mirror here at college to remind me of them more often.  I still want to grow in intentionality; to stop procrastinating and winging everything.  I still want to learn to embrace changes and transition instead of running or hiding.  And I still want to learn to be more enchantedwith the world.  This is from a quote about C.S. Lewis, commenting on his absolute “willingness to be enchanted” because he knew he deserved nothing and that everything he had was because of God’s great grace. 

It also goes along with my resolution of a few weeks ago to stop complaining.  And the more enchanted I am, the more I view things as a blessing than a bother or overlook the bothering things – the less I complain. 

Anyway, I can’t really say how much my year has been characterized by these words, but I’ve certainly remembered them more often.  If it’s possible to love words, I really do love them.  I might pick the same ones for next year.

But thinking about words last night (after the fifteen-minute coughing fit I had – my poor roommate puts up with so much!) made me think about words I want to characterize me.  One of those “describe me in one word” things.  Of course, I couldn’t think of just one – more like twenty million – but I did hit on a more unique word that I would love to embody. 

Whimsical. 

Isn’t that a fun word?  It just suggests creativity, fun, spunk, and cute all rolled into one.  Oh, my love affair with words.

Speaking of words, my next writing assignment is a narrative.  I’m excited – and, confession – a little bit nervous.  I’ve never had people actually grade my creative work before.  But I know it will be way more fun to write than the rhetorical analysis I slaved over all last week.  It’s so much easier to invent things and dialogue when you don’t know where you’re going with the paper.  Although I didn’t think my English teacher would appreciate my desperate explanation that I don’t know how a story, even a narrative, is going to end until it does – not after that talk about intentional structuring – so I may have to write my paper by Monday just so it matches the proposal.  We’ll see. 

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One of my goals at college is to take advantage of the special opportunities one only gets at college.  Things like the cool Honors College Oxford Debate on the government bailout, or the guest visit/talk by senator Joe Wilson from VA, or the choral concert last Saturday, or the debate between Howard Dean and Karl Rove at the end of the month that I’m super excited about.  So, I’m trying.  And so far, lots of fun things have been going on! 

There’s a Broadway show playing for two nights this week, Avenue Q, and I’m excited they’re bringing Broadway shows here.  I would totally go see it, except that it’s not the kind of show I really want to see.  Please, please, please bring some really amazing shows here, Penn State?  (or, really amazing by my standards shows?)  Something tells me it may not happen anytime soon. 

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I got a text from PSU informing me that high winds were a danger and two roads were closed.  Hmmm – no wonder I’ve been almost blown over a couple of times today.  I opted to eat lunch in the dining hall today instead of getting take-out: I wasn’t sure the box and I would make it back together! 

All the same, I’m off to stroll downtown for a bit.  Call me crazy!

fun & love,

megan