red shirt blue pants

I often find myself spending hours reflecting on myself and my life and my God. I find that while experience is the greatest teacher, I would not remember a single lesson unless I study and reflect on what I have learned and am learning.

Occasionally, the though crosses my mind that these are the things people blog about. They think deeply and then write those thoughts.

I am not one who is talented in putting my thoughts into words. It is not always easy for me to write. And I am not good at doing things consistently. My own journal and my blog are both lacking.

So instead of making a resolution to write a few poetic and profound entries each week, or trying to go back to the emotions I experienced in the past month and “catch up” on my writing- pretending I never neglected to write, I will just summarize so of the lessons I am learning and some of the lessons I have been remembering as of late…

If you ask God to break your heart, he is sure to answer swiftly and completely and you are sure to not regret it, though it is painful.

Life is a funny thing, how it ends in death. And death is a funny thing how it ends in life. The death of one who is old and well lived does not seem so harsh when someone young is dying too. And the delay of one’s dreams or the removal of one’s friends, although difficult, are certainly not so bad either.

As much as you forget and neglect God, He will never forget or neglect you. Never. He will always be there when you come back to Him, and I will always wonder why I ever left.

Pride leads to downfall. I learned this in high school English class, but somehow I forgot. I remembered again when the slightest bit of confidence was followed by the near blowing up of a scrap yard and a mistake on a wedding dress.

Sometimes, you learn something about yourself, and you feel that this one thing you just learned defines you entirely. It is good to learn and to discover who you are- It helps you to better relate to yourself and the world around you and the people you love. But it is incredibly liberating to, after having learned, realize that what ever it is, whether it is dyslexia or the enneagram, it is not you. You are you, and it may describe part of who you are or how you behave or think or feel, but it is just a tiny part of this glorious creature that God has created.

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There have been many more lessons and thoughts and reflections that I have not yet found words for… but these are a few of the dominant ones… I hope to share more someday about how and why I am learning these things, but for now, this is all I have for you.

Peace.

I am studying Social Work in college.

Translation: I spend thousands of dollars every year to sit in professor facilitated discussions about ethical dilemmas… what to do in those situations where no one can win, or where right and wrong is a bit foggy…

If a woman is having a baby and you can only save one, who do you save?

Is assisted suicide okay?

What are the rights of children, the rights of their parents, and what do you do when they conflict?

…

If a man in his thirties has a casual conversation about not wanting to ever be in a vegetative state, and a week later gets in a horrible motor cycle accident, and is in a coma for three weeks, and after four weeks people almost never come out of comas, and he has a mother, father, fiance, ex-wife, two daughters and three very close brothers…

If all of that were to happen, would you pull the plug? and who has the right to decide?

Right now, my family is having to figure that out.

Hypothetical situations and ethical dilemmas aren’t supposed to actually be real… They aren’t supposed to happen to your cousins… They aren’t supposed to be anything more than exercises in decision making and games to determine what you value… They aren’t supposed to be real…

But sometimes, unfortunately, they are.

In classroom discussion groups and lectures and such, this is very easy to forget.

But today, i can to anything but forget my cousin lying in the hospital as others determine whether he lives or dies.

Please pray for him. and for his family who is having to decide what to do.

A few months ago I went to Wisconsin for a week. Silly me, I forgot to water the house-plant garden that I had in my apartment. The plants were quite sickly when I returned, and other than a sporadic watering, I neglected to nurse them back to health. School took up all of my time and energy, and frankly, I cared more about getting a little rest from work and worry than nurturing them as I should have.

Today is the first day of summer vacation. I moved out of my apartment, and packed up that garden with the rest of my stuff. Of 6 plants, two were dead, two were thriving, and two needed some pruning. I went to clip off the dying vines so that new ones could grow, but was stopped short by what I saw.

The vines that I was going to clip had new leaves at their ends. six or seven inches of deadness and leaves that crumbled at the slightest touch, but just a little further along there were more leaves soft to the touch and very much alive.

Sometimes I think we are like that plant. Humans begin to slowly die when they are not cared for, nurtured, loved. But even when we do whither, and our leaves crumble- even if no one helps to fix the problem afterward and prunes those dying vines, new life can come from that.

In school and on the side, I learn a lot about the long term effects of painful pasts. Some scars never go away. Our experiences affect us deeply and completely and it is easy for us to fear that we will never be whole again. That we will never be alive again. That we will never be able to thrive and give back to the world again.

Now I have a wonderful ‘Purple Wandering Jew’ that has a dozen long vines, with six or seven inches between the roots and first leaves. That stretch of vine will be there until the plant dies, always remembering the weeks of neglect. But after those few inches, there are leaves. And those leaves are just as beautiful, soft, alive as the leaves that grew on the plant before.

Perhaps we can be just as alive as we were before. Forever altered, but no less wonderful.