Clean dishes and a cloudy Wednesday

Sometimes when you're 20 and summertime hours are your own, dinner consists of a bag of popcorn, dried mango strips you strategically placed in 10 separate bags of trail mix to avoid eating all of them at once (Ha! Thwarted. Take that past me), and more coffee just because it sounds good. I do not advertise such habits, nor do I regret my decision. I only wish mango strips came in larger quantities, they really are swoon-worthy. Apart from all of this, I am grateful to be in Lincoln for the next few months. No, this is not a post consisting of the challenges I will face and an adolescent list of things I hope to overcome with a large portion of Jack Johnson and a heaping side of nostalgia. I've told and retold that cheesy story several times already. I'm done with it.

I do miss home. I do. But to be quite honest with you, I'm tired of missing home. I'm tired of longing for the view of my backyard from my bed. It's time to embrace looking out my Lincoln window means encountering a shabby brick wall courtesy of my next-door-never-bringing-over-a-bunt-cake-because-you're-sketchy neighbors. I'm exhausted from trying to recreate the stillness that can only be found in my Minnesota kitchen on a weekday morning. My current kitchen holds the echos of young hispanic cries that rent out the basement. It's not that I can't tune out the noise, I definitely can after living here 9 (almost 10) months, but I cannot expect the quiet breeze of suburbia. I am done holding my Nebraska home to Minnesota standards, it will always lose. Not because where I am now is 'less than,' but because the present will always lose to the past. It all seems silly, nostalgia. This is the life I want. The one The Lord has so graciously given me, and yet there's always a more enjoyable walk, crisper air, more joy lingering in the subdivisions of memory lane. It's time now. It's time to relinquish my grasp on where my family has always been and make wherever I am my home. I've become pretty good at that, thanks to the sovereignty of my Heavenly Father who has built a home amongst valuable Nebraskan faces, eager international students, and dusty wood paneling. I cannot bring myself to utter the phrases "over the past three years" or "since coming to college" because, well, for one thing I'm a stubborn snob when it comes to cliched phrases, and two, there is a time and place for reflection, but there also is something to be said for sitting in your pajamas, reading this book, and embracing traditions of summer no matter which state you reside it.

Just to be ironic, black and white photos of summer and this song seemed appropriate:

Or if that's too dark and melancholy, there's always this alternative

Happy lazy Wednesday, folks.

Finals Week

This Song and these photos remind me all things are made new.

It has been a memorable semester.

Side note: I cannot WAIT until the day I do not have to measure periods of my life in semesters, breaks, and 50 minute time blocks.

- but anyway -

My posts always manifest themselves as lists, and I'm perfectly okay with that. Hope you are too.

     Thankful for the change, the blurry nights of no sleep and coffee headaches. I'm thankful for grace, lengthy modernist texts, and fiction writing that makes me feel free. I'm thankful for wet boots and icy mornings. I'm thankful for new vacuums, for mismatched furniture and spontaneous trips to the cheesecake factory.

     There's so much left to do. So many more countries to explore and (slighly neurotic) pages to write. I have much to learn about the Great I AM and how losing myself in His grace is the only way to live. I am a broken mess and continue to grow - in small bursts and over large stretches of "I can't do this." And yes, the next several days involve seven painful pages of French literature analysis and an early morning final. I have responsibilities. I have groceries. I have worries. Yet I also have confidence in The Lord and in this:

Isaiah 43: 18-19

"Forget the former things; 

do not dwell on the past.

See, I am doing a new thing! 

Now it springs up; 

do you not perceive it? 

I am making a way in the wilderness 

and streams in the wasteland."