Experience...

Experience: the most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn ~ C. S. Lewis

I am attempting to write a speech for my graduation in May. Well, it's really a trial speech to see if the powers that be like my style and what I have to say. Before everyone gets excited, this quote is all I have so far. My rough draft? Due tomorrow. "But," you say, eyes going wild, "Laura, you don't write rough drafts." I know. "You spend weeks planning and thinking and mulling thoughts over and regurgitate a perfect piece into a Word.doc the night before." I know, I know! The thing about rough drafts is that people usually want to see 80-90% of the actual completed piece in whatever "draft" you give them. The changes to be made are THEIR suggestions, not your own tweaks to perfect things. This idea of a rough draft has me scared. Frightened. Terrified. I feel like I'm under this huge pressure to summarize my "education and experience" at Alvernia in a page, to condense my 4 very long years of undergrad into 4 paragraphs of a quippy intelligent commentary on higher education. Without being cheesy or lame.
But more than the fear of being cheesy and lame, I'm scared about what that might mean about the past 4 years. Can I really sum up all those experiences? Can I sum up my job at the library that spans 2 solid years and a smattering of summers and breaks? Can I sum up my job at the learning center and all the crazy, I mean, interesting people I've met there? Can I sum up my semester abroad in such a short space? The classes, the professors? It's not the capstone of my education (that honor is reserved for my ginormous thesis due at end of term and yes, I've changed topics. Again.), but I feel it must somehow represent EVERYTHING. That fact that I might be able to do this scares me and makes me feel like the months, weeks, days and hours that made up my undergrad can be grouped and packaged together in the box labeled "Experience" that sits on the shelf next to the box labeled "Memories."

On a less depressing note, I figured that dividing my thesis into three parts (three different books that I'm going to look at) means 3, 7 page papers in the course of the semester. Now that is do-able.

Double snow day

These last few days have been CRAZY! Who knew that the sky and the heavens could hold so much snow?! I don't have a final report for you, but it was at least up to my knees. And then, it snowed some more! And guess who got to shovel out the household? Yup. Me. I rock.
Things were going well, except for the snow and the cold. Wednesday afternoon came and took the electricity with it. In a flurry of excitement and consternation (pun, however unfortunate, was intended), mother and I hauled out the generator. On a normal day this is a chore. On a day that I had to shovel the path to the barn to get the generator out and pull it up the hill, well, I felt like SuperWoman when it all was said and done (and like I should have tied a rope from the house to the barn like in Little House on the Prairie). We ran the generator for about 4 hours. As the night wore down, and Mercy ended, we took care of our nightly routine (blanket? check, lantern and flashlight? check) in preparation for shutting down the generator. (Heffner girls: do ya'll remember those blue flashlights from Weaver's that we got at the Oley Fair ages ago? Yeah, mine still worked! Go me!) Mom unplugged the plug and unswitched the switches. I moved the generator into the basement, so crazies who actually made it through all of the snow to our back porch couldn't steal it.We get our lanterns and get ready to go upstairs, when mom stops. "Did the freezer motor just go on?" Click goes the light by the washing machine. Light. Oh well.
The weekend was full of shoveling, shoveling, cold, snow, and more shoveling. My dad and I did a lot of clean up work, part of which involved cleaning out George, little sister's car, who got buried in the snow, and knocking the icicles off the gutter. May I just add that I was TERRIFIED that I would be impaled by a falling icicles? I was! (I almost put a video link to it here, but decided against it. It brings flashbacks.) Needless to say, I pretty much stood back and watched for that one.
I should get working on something now...that would be good. A little bit of school work, a little bit of resume work. And I swear, if there is any more snow I'm moving to somewhere HOT. Or to London. Either way...

"He is already in tomorrow"

An hour after I posted my last entry, I read an excerpt from Mere Christianity that coincided almost exactly to what I was trying to express! I was completely blown away. I wanted to share some of what the great C. S. Lewis has to say about the way God sees time:

...suppose God is outside and above the Time-line. In that case, what we call 'tomorrow is visible to Him in just the same way as what we call 'today.' All the days are 'Now' for Him.

I find this thought to be extraordinarily encouraging. Why should I worry (or be concerned) with things that will happen tomorrow or today? If God sees our tomorrow's and today's as a great big NOW, why should I think He doesn't see every thing that came/comes/will come my way?

It means that the pregnancy my friend prayed for (and is finally experiencing!) was on the Time-line before she even thought about it! It means that the baptism of my (other) friend's husband that we had been praying for ever since I met them (and years beyond that) was already on God's agenda for this past Sunday! It means the thesis paper I am struggling to write is already completed! (And can I get a great big AMEN on that one?!?!)

You know what it means? It means that Matthew 6:25-34 is RIGHT!

~So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself~ Matt. 6:34