A lesson in accepting people and things just the way God made them (even if it wouldn't be my way of choosing them). Things feel different again. I've been doing a lot of thinking about this blog and the fact that I don't seem to have the stream of thoughts to record here that I used to. I've wondered if I've grown out of the purposes that writing here used to fulfill. I've wondered if the loss of depression has led to the discontinued need to write here. I don't know. Regardless of all of these things, I do find myself with something to write here today.

It has been quite a different school year, but an even different-er semester. I'm to the point of feeling ready to emerge from the cocoon dutifully called "school" into a different life. I've been reminded, however, in the last few weeks of the eminent change and uncertainty that I've been ignoring with a personal sense of control I like to misguidedly apply to all elements of future life. I hear the voice of reality calling me a bit louder each day out of my illusionistic stupor. Change is coming, I hear it whisper, and it is not going to be controlled by you.

Yesterday I met with a teacher in Longmont to speak about a student teaching placement in her classroom. This location, this teacher, this school would not have been something I would have chosen on my own, but seems to be a place that I can grow and learn. Things felt good. I could see myself transferring my settled life to this place, finding an apartment or some space to put a bed and couch and table and making a new life there.

And then I drove home, opened my computer to greet the awaiting email from a possible part-two placement in Loveland, a good 40 minutes away from placement #1 and a good much too close to the place I was hoping not to be that close too. Within an instant of reading the words "Mary Blair," my plans changed. Hope you like commuting and temporary housing that other voice said. Things don't always go the way you think they should.

Change is rolling in like gray thunderheads. I see them coming, but the magnitude of the storm is yet to be determined. Friendships are changing. I'm clenching my stubborn little fists around keeping things the same, keeping people where I want them to be.

I've been thinking a lot this semester about realtionships. Relationships with people who are different from me. Relationships with people that take work and acceptance and understanding. Relationships that require a daily reminder to myself that the acceptance of others does not determine my worth. Daily working through the reality that just because someone thinks slightly differently that I do does not make either of us less important or more right. I've been struggling with the butting heads and clashing opionions. My easy friendships are absent and the difficult ones, although no less beautiful or important, have defined much of this season. I'm realizing my need to accept people as they are, even if I don't get it, and to accept myself, even when it feels like nobody else gets me.

I don't know what this next season will hold. I do not know where I will be, what my environment will be like or if I'll even have a say in the furniture of my life. But I cannot help but listen to the sense that I may be asked to give some things up, to give some things away, to let go of a lot of things. As I put red ink down on creamy paper surrounding these thoughts, I could not think of the Isrealits reminder, "Our fathers were wandering Aramaics." I couldn't help but conjure images of the wilderness along 287 and the small neighborhoods along the way that appear lonely and isoloated now and long drives ahead of me.

I realize that I've been applying my belief in God's provision to my own plans. The last couple of days, however, have opened my eyes to the reality that I am purusing a life in which He is the leader, and my life is found inside of his heart. And perhaps I am being led into the wilderness and He holds his hand open to recieve the sense of security that I can create and maintain so he can give me something better.