The good things in life.

Wow, I just realized that a lot has happened in my life since my last post. It's more of that stuff that I don't really want to talk about in public. If you really want to know what's been going on and you know me, send me an email or something and I'll try to bring you up to speed. As for the rest of you nameless peoples, just know - for the sake of the rest of this post - that a lot has gone on in my life over the past month. It's been as one of my friends described, an emotional roller coaster.

So I've got this emotional roller coaster going, and school is throwing a whole bunch of work at me quite suddenly. I'm working on my third paper of this week right. It's a 9 pager due tomorrow and when it's done, I need to get right started on another. On top of all this, I have a two fairly large events coming up at school that I'm organizing and putting on. My stress levels are rising and at the same time, my bank account is dropping... significantly.

School's particularly rough right now because of the classes I have. Namely, all of my classes have little or nothing to do with what I want to end up doing - whatever that may be. I know I don't want to be a pastor, or a youth pastor, or a worship pastor, or a glorified overseas pastor (we call them missionaries here), so doing a paper on correctly interpreting the book of Jonah, or learning about church history... all of these things seem pointless to me. I lack so much motivation right now, its not in the least bit funny.

Then there's the problem that I don't know where I'm going in life. This gets me down. I started out the year wanting to do something that would change the world in some sort of significant way. Now I just want to find a really good paying job to comfortably support some future family that, I keep having to remind myself, doesn't exist yet. And what ever I end up doing, I don't want to become a pastor.

So this has turned into a whine fest and that was never the intent. I apologize for boring you with my complaints. Here is where I meant to go with this.

I was walking to the public library yesterday with all of these things weighing heavily upon me - in the rain I might add - when I started noticing a few things. For starters, I was listening to my favorite Wilco song, "I'm Just Trying to Break Your Heart." Aside from the simple fact that both the band and the record are beautiful in and of itself, the song is simply amazing. It was also in this moment that I caught a glimpse of a grandmother playing with her toddler grandson in the front window of there simple duplex. The song, paired with moment shared between the child, grandmother, and unknown bystander was exactly what I needed in that moment. It was a gift from God, showing me the simple fact that there are still very good things in this world.

As I reflected on this brief moment in time, I realized how necessary it is for me to remember the good things in life, however simple they may be.

Edit: I just realized the I may have offended somebody by calling missionaries "glorified overseas pastors." Pleas don't take offense, what I wrote was written out of a little but of bitterness and frustration. I think there are many noble missionaries out there who do a lot of good for the world.