Josh and I WON!

We won our SSA matches! http://www.ssashooter.net/
As you can see, I'm the top D shooter and he was the top B shooter yesterday. GO US! ha ha ha, and I beat his sheriff friend who was the top shooter in his class. Sweet! So fun!

humm, hmm, hmm, ha

Today, today was an excellent day in many ways. Even though I was amazingly stupid, not thinking about how much caffeine I've drunk this last week and I slept in until 12, waking up with a blinding headache from not having drunk caffeine for several hours ... it was still a great day. I laid around on the coach and read all day. My house is clean (because we're having friends over tomorrow night). And then I got to have dinner with a girl that I really enjoy and care about. Yup, good day! There's nothing like catching up on your sleep to make you feel great!

My only regret is that I didn't get to hang out with my niece today like she wanted to. Last night she invited me over for dinner (I wonder if her parents knew?) but I was already booked so I told her that I couldn't and she looked so sad. How is Cinderella supposed to go to the ball without her godmother? (She has decided that she's Cinderella and I'm the fairy godmother). Last night was really fun too! Sam, with his great 2-year-old imagination, decided that my hair was a great place to drive his toy trucks, cars, and tractors in. They kept getting "stuck" in my hair and had to be pulled out by a tractor (which involved quite a bit of work!) It was funny because occasionally they actually did get stuck in my hair and then he wasn't quite sure how to get them out (apart from yanking, which didn't work very well). Katie and Jane are recognizing me now and smiling, cooing, and walking to me. It is such a sweet thing to be loved by little kids!

Josh is working over time again tonight, but I'll get to see him tomorrow so that'll be awesome! I love it when we get to see each other and have time to hang out together! He put on a bbq at work today and apparently it went really well. =) It's so fun to see him do the things that he's good at!

I'm the spider looking up at the magnifying glass

and the view seems awfully reversed. I should be the one looking down. Being an adult is so strange! And it strikes me that teachers must have a singularly odd psych profile - to have such utterly strong convictions (no matter what religion or creed) that despite what a room full of teenagers may say - what you (the teacher) are saying is so important that they oughta shut up and listen to you for 55 minutes straight strikes me as ... slightly insane, hmm, maybe zealous, and awfully over confident. And yet I teach. They say that teenagers think that they know everything? Gee, I wonder what role models they get that complex from?

This has been a crazy hyped-up week, what with WASC accreditation and all. Yesterday was our last day of accreditation and after school we had a meeting from which I went straight to tutoring, ran home, threw on a dress, and went and saw the stunning Alvin Ailey at the Dorothy Chandler because I was chaperoning a field trip for the dance class. Today after school I ran over to help out with our track meet - ah the bitter sweet memories! Is it totally sad that I wish that I still got to be on the track team? To not have to motivate myself to run but have a coach yell at me and design all my workouts? They are so lucky!

This whole week I haven't gotten more than 5 1/2 hours of sleep per night and I've been living on caffeine and sugar. I keep having trouble keeping my Spanish separate from my English and I caught myself mumbling to myself as I walked through Costco today. All I need is hair rollers, a worn out bathrobe, a few dozen cats, and I am set to be the crazy lady! I am actually going to go to bed soon and the Lord willing get 8 1/2 hours of sleep, but I will leave you with one last thing. Each year we coaches have to come up with something to write in the senior's memory books - one last word to leave with them. After the rough season I really didn't know what to say, so I put it off till the last minute and here is what I came up with for them:

A woman is known for her fear of the Lord
She's something real fiercesome and grand
A woman is power, community too
A woman is lending a hand
A woman - submission, humility, grace
Dark backdrop on which the stars shine
A woman is growing to help others grow
Be spice that makes all things sublime!

When I read that again this Summer, after I've recovered some sleep and sanity ... I really hope that it's not something that I'll be embarrassed of!

Here we come a lentening: A Trinity of Experience

Here we are, the second week of Lent, and I am seeing results of God's work already. I am, once again, having my students celebrate Lent by fasting and picking a Spanish-speaking country to pray for and look for signs of God moving in that country (while I fast, pray for my students, and look for signs of God moving in them). One of my students caught me yesterday after class and told me that she picked Mexico and she always hated Mexicans and while she was praying last week she kept hearing the song, "open the eyes of my heart Lord" while she was praying and she realized that God LOVES Mexicans and she repented of her racism and is starting to see them differently. I laughed with joy as I pointed out to her that she HEARD God talking to her! (So cool to see!) The saddest story is the boy who came to me at lunch today and told me that he doesn't like praying and that this project is really hard for him because he has never heard God talk to him before in his entire life so he's really struggling to have the faith to even pray. I am really praying for him, that God would open his ears and eyes to see and hear God's voice and love. Please pray for him too.

My little Katie, the girl that I tutor, when I left her on Monday was elated that she finally understood how Spanish worked. Her Spanish teacher, however, upon seeing her all-of-the-sudden correct answers decided that Katie was cheating and Tuesday saw Katie leaving class crying. Her mom talked to Katie's counselor today, who I am pretty sure is my friend Vicky who I know from ISF, and there ends the story for now. We'll see next week where it's all going. The thing is, I've seen God's fingers in this pudding too much to be distressed and I'm curious to see what he's doing with it. There are just too many coincidences. Me and Vicky in this family's life? Is this how God is going to lead them to salvation? What blessing is he going to do for them? I can hardly wait to see.

The third thing is an interesting dream that I had a few nights past. It was an analogy that God gave me for life. In my dream, (my) Josh and I were hiking in the dry hills on a hot day where the clouds are high and wispy with that light light blue sky that you get here in high Summer. We were walking through snake country, but I had had inoculations against snake poison. Josh saw a thin black snake with one red stripe down each side and picked it up out of curiosity. As he was holding it, it leaped out and bit me on the top of my right arm, in the muscle. As I watched my skin began to ooze with infection, but it wasn't fatal like it would have been because of the inoculation. In an odd dream fast-forward, the bite mark began to heal, but kept oozing a little and crusted over with that odd yellow scab. It burned, and hurt blazingly, and I was furious with Josh for picking up a dangerous snake, but I realized that it would all be ok because I had been freed from the consequence of death. The Josh in my dream represented a part of me. It was I who picked up the snake. The inoculation was Jesus' blood. The bite and poison was sin. The pain that I suffered was real, I suffer because of my sin and other's sin, but it isn't a fatal suffering. Even though I do dumb stuff and pick up snakes that I know I shouldn't, and I suffer for it, or even when I'm just viciously attacked by the Devil, I am inoculated and won't die. This is what Jesus has done for me. This is what Jesus has done for all of us. I woke up with a feeling of horror, wondering if a snake bite hurt so much, how much more did the whip that bit Jesus hurt?

Ask and you shall receive

So a few weeks ago, sitting at my chiropractor's I heard a mother trying to talk her daughter into having her boyfriend tutoring her for Spanish. Her daughter refused because it would be SO embarrassing! So I introduced myself, told them what I did and that I offer tutoring. I gave them my number, chatted a bit, and left it at that. After I didn't hear from them for a week I figured that they found someone else, but today I got a call.

So now I'm tutoring Uncle Phil's neighbor (such an fun coincidence!) for $40 an hour twice a week. I tutored her for the first time tonight and she's a sweetheart. I guess I will have some money to buy new clothes for my Europe trip after all. (Most important item on that list? Walking shoes!) It was just a cool God thing. It's funny to have a part-time job again, now that I'm working full time. But all my full-time money goes to grown-up stuff, so it's neat to have some income that I'm not obliged to save for a house with. =)

what we dream of

I taught the future tense to my kids this last week or so, and so I had them write just 10 sentences about what they wanted to do/be in the future. They all wanted to graduate high school, go the college, have a career, hopefully get married, and have 2-6 children. Boil it down, and we all want to work, relate, and reproduce. That is apparently what God made us for. It seems so simple, these sweet dreams that my students have, but when faced with real life, the trails of college, relationship, finances, temptation, and betrayal, how many of these dreams will become reality? I know that my high school dreams still haven't all come true, despite all of my hard work. I'm still missing that last piece. I can only pray that God will protect my hopeful students and grant them these blessings in his own time. I can only pray the same for myself as well.

The more that I look at life and the psychology of development, the more I realize how frail we are. We balance on the point of a knife daily. Each day is capable of changing the events of history forever. It seems that we could be too powerful for our own good, and yet we rarely realize it or act on it. And great evil seems so much easier to accomplish than great good. But it is not usually the huge events that move us forward, but the daily work and steady discipline that we come to know and love under the direction of the Almighty. It is the simple small things that bring us pleasure and fulfillment, and the continuous hope of a better future. It is the past the inspires or embitters us, the now that we struggle against, and the future that beckons for better or for ill. It is never our choice to live, but since we have been given life we prove what sort of fibre we are made of by how we stand up to the unasked for challenges.