I am remembering how much there is to Jessie Doerrer beyond the scorned ex-girlfriend. This week has had some melancholy and specified hopes for the future, but it has mostly just been this abiding sense of calm and confidence in myself. I forgot how much I really like me. I like my body, I like how seriously I take all of you, I like my smile, I like how many things in life make me laugh, I like that I enjoy getting lost when I am alone and learning new ways back home, I like the newness of lessons and inspiration each day brings to me, and lately I especially like how much more I see I need to grow. I am just getting started. And I like that. Strange how you can just forget about that entirely in the midst of one hard spot in time.

(i can feel my mom rejoicing over this entry right now if she's figured out that I switched the web address. :))

another quote I HAVE to share with because it is so inspired: by Henri Frederic Amiel:

"Strange reminiscence! At the end of the terrace of La Treille, on the eastern side, as I looked down the slope, it seemed to me that I saw once more in imagination a little path which existed there when I was a child, and ran through the bushy underwood, which was thicker than it is now. It is at least forty years since this impression disappeared from my mind. The arrival of an image so dead and forgotten set me thinking. Consciousness seems to be like a book in which the leaves turned by life successively cover and hide each other in spite of their semi-transparency; but although the book may be open at the page of the present, the wind, for a few seconds, may blow back the first pages into view.

And at death will these leaves cease to hide each other, and shall we see all our past at once? Is death the passage from the successive to the simultaneous--that is, from time to eternity? Shall we then understand, in its unity, the poem or mysterious episode of our existence, which till then we have spelled out phrase by phrase? If so, death would be like the traveller at the top of a great mountain, whence he sees spread out before him the whole configuration of the country, of which till then he had but passing glimpses. To be able to overlook one's own history, to divine its meaning in the general concert and the divine plan, would be the beginning of eternal felicity. We had toiled and labored under the conductor of the orchestra; and we should find ourselves to be surprised and delighted hearers. We had seen nothing but our own little path in the mist; and suddenly a marvellous panorama and boundless distances would open before our dazzled eyes. And why not?"

THINK ABOUT THAT! I consider this carefully lately: friends like Josh or Liam or Marlene who I have seen walk such long, tired paths before, but I get so so touched to think of how their lives have been turned upside down when they least expect it by love and by blessings. That is just how the world works and I am glad it works that way. Pain and loneliness doesn't last forever. Direction comes and so does peace.

And thank you, Jesus because you did not just choose to rise or be transfigured but also to embrace humiliation and abandonment and both of those things equally manifest your glory.