"I believe there is another world waiting for us, Sixsmith. A better world. And I'll be waiting for you there."

This movie haunts me before I have even seen it. I watch this trailer at least twice a day. The music makes my eyes water. Even if this fails in the box office, this is one of the best movie trailers I've ever seen.

Yep. Cannot wait.

Well, here's something worth announcing. I was talking to my counselor about different places I've been researching to possibly move to for graduate school. About four options were on the table. After several exchanges, my counselor said offhandedly, "Well when it comes down to it, I hope you choose where you go most of all because of the program itself."

And that's when I realized I've had my priorities a little shaky. Like the iPhone apps get when you delete or move them. ;)

I've been focusing on where I want to settle down, using grad school as a reason to move there. Well there are pros and cons to every city, and the thing that will get me through the cons of where I live will have to be the reason I moved there in the first place: my grad program. I need to love that, then move from there.

So I started revisiting my options without any regard to where they were located. Within an hour, we had a winner. And the winner is an ironic one, since it is the first choice I had four years ago when I started thinking about grad school at all:

Whose Graduate Program Center resides in...

So that's the goal, the plan, and the pursuit. This will be super embarrassing if I don't get in, haha. All the more reason to make it happen! I may apply to more than one for a safety net, mind you.

Sometimes I feel like my mind, without my permission, does routine maintenance down memory lane. It's as if it makes sure it still has as much information stored as possible for a particular setting. I'll walk into a room I've walked into thousands of times and distinctly remember something that happened in it years ago as if it happened yesterday. I walked into the Starbucks by my house yesterday and immediately remembered the night I was fourteen and met my youth pastor and a guy friend there to talk about something I can't remember. That was the first night that particular friend drove me home, the first of many to come and the beginning of our more-than-friendship days. I've had so many memories there since that night nine years ago, more intense and meaningful memories at that, and yet it replayed in my head as if it were only one memory of a dozen to choose from. I was sitting in my living room one afternoon after work and remembered my first time walking into this house four years ago with Missy to meet Cathy, wishing so badly I could live in a house like this one day with roommates. My counselor's office is in the same complex as Mike and Rhonda's used to be, and I remembered getting breakfast there with my youth group after our 30-hour famine weekend. French toast never tasted so good.

It feels like my life is lazily flashing before my eyes, grounding me in this moment on the spectrum of time, reminding me this is not the only moment that has ever existed in this place and it will not be the last. Not all of the memories I've recently experienced have been pleasant ones. That same Starbucks where my more-than-friendship started was the same Starbucks where that more-than-friendship ended three years later, and I remember that just as clearly as the previous one. My living room where I dreamed it would be mine is also the living room I've cried my eyes out in for one reason or another. Life happens. Soak up the joys and breathe through the sorrows. Even at the unripe old age of 23, I can confidently say that I have lived a good life on this Earth. My fondest and most painful memories both remind me, in the same ways, that I have lived.

...and I plan on doing a bit more living, so let's not be so conclusive about my life yet, haha.

Bed time.

Progress, my own and in general

This has been such a season of growth for me, there is no way I could dictate everything I've been mentally chewing on lately. It's crazy how the humility produced by brokenness is the very key to progress in life, because it is the death of the self. I'm beginning to think that Jesus didn't teach people how to live, He taught them how life/humanity works whether we approve of it or not. I see no other option for progress from brokenness than through humility. Doesn't matter how I feel about it.

I recently went to Michigan with Beasley and her family to their incredible lake house in Pentwater. It was the most beautiful marriage between woods and seashore that I've ever experienced, and I'm hoping that won't be my only time visiting. All the natural beauty led to mental stimulation of epic proportions! I read two books and wrote three front-and-back pages worth of journaling, plus finished a song I'd been writing.

This is the very edge of the pier in Pentwater with the other Caitlin in the clan, Beasley's cousin. This is in the middle of a great conversation the three of us were having. How can you NOT have a great conversation with that view and waves crashing all around you?! It was the perfect vacation I needed, and with all that mental stimulation I realized a few things floating around in my subconscious that, when brought into the light, change the game. Progress progress progress.

Though it took a week away to an oasis to figure out a few specific nuggets of truth, one treasure plopped into my head one night as I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep a few nights ago. Suddenly, as if teaching myself this truth, I said aloud:

"I will not experience every 'good' available in this lifetime."

And then, as if that truth implies another one, I said:

"I am entitled to no 'good' available in this lifetime."

Oh man. Talk about a game changer. A sport changer, to stretch the analogy further. If I am guaranteed nothing in particular, but am promised good and prosperity by God at the end of whatever may come, how much freedom there is to be had! Life becomes less about looking for good things and trying to make them mine, trying to choose what God may bless me with. It becomes more about what God has for me, come what may.

I just came out of a season of what seemed to be irrational resentment toward God. With the help of Timothy Keller's book Prodigal God, I realized that I'd been treating the last year of my life like the older brother treated his work in Jesus's prodigal son parable. I embraced my serving opportunities with rolled eyes and the thought of "Well if God wants me to, I guess it's the right thing to do" with the hidden assumption that I'll be awarded for such self-sacrificing behavior. If I jumped through the hoops and followed the rules, I would get the good things I want. I was already doing the good things HE wanted of me, and because of this I deserved my personal desires on my own terms. Like vacation days accumulated in the work place (not a vacation from good, but a vacation from God's terms for good).

This didn't end well, as you can imagine. But all I was consciously aware of was an anger toward God that I'd never experienced before. So I unraveled it, cried a lot, and those two nuggets of truth I shared felt like the nails in the coffin of that ugly phase of our relationship. I will not experience every good available in this lifetime, and I am entitled to no good available in this lifetime. If that sounds like pessimism or a poor self-esteem to you, I assure you t'is not. :)

So with freedom fresh in my lungs and big decisions on my horizons, life is good. A good I did not earn, a good that is a gift.

Until next time!