Laura Story - Blessings

I posted this on Facebook not too long ago...but sometimes these things call for us to revisit them.

Amazing love.

It's amazing how different experiences in life prepare you for different experiences in life. Its amazing how when you think you lose one thing, you find yourself giving that very same thing to others. Its amazing when you need to hear something, and then you do. Its almost as if there was someone orchestrating it. Its almost as if there was someone planning my path, someone who knows how I will react. Knows my buttons. Knows my breaking point...no, my...turning point. Its amazing what you will hear when you listen. Its amazing what you'll see, when you look. And its amazing what you learn about yourself when you are completely honest with yourself. And its even more amazing when you are honest about yourself...with God. Its amazing...love. I know I'm kind of abusing the use of the ellipsis here, but all of this has been unfolding to me as if I was living in slow motion. And I can't make you, the reader, read slowly...unless...I use...the ellipsis. Anyways, I'm going to tell you about me in hopes that you won't learn about me, but about you.

I am...not loving towards others. I am cynical. I am not forgiving. I am bitter. I am not humble. I am selfish. I am not merciful. I am angry. There is one person that saw that behind my facade. And he knew I needed saving. So he threw a curve ball at me. I am no good at baseball. But when I was on the ground reeling from the blow I looked up...and I saw, really saw, the hundreds of people sitting in the stands for the first time, and I realized that there is more to life than the game I try to play. At first I was angry, on the ground and dirty watching the baseball roll away and I couldn't get up from the pain of the blow. Then...I couldn't get up for seeing all the people around me that needed. That hurt. That have no Savior to lean on. Being on the ball field is safe, I know the rules and I try to follow them and ignore everything else...but lets face it, I'm no good at baseball...its probably time for me to walk off the field and go walk amongst all the people in the stands. Its scary. Especially because I see the guy that threw the curve ball at me, and HEs the one who wants to walk around the stands with me? Is that really safe? Oh...wait...he's the one...that threw the hard ball...that knocked me over...that scuffed my hands...that brought me to my senses...that made me look away from myself...that made me realize what life is supposed to be about...

Maybe that guy is not so bad after all. Maybe he is amazing. Maybe that...is amazing love.

In Soviet Russia vegetables don't like you.

I am eating too many vegetables. Rather, I'm not eating enough delicious carbs!! I miss candy and Cheetos. And to top it off I just found two dog hairs in my food! Dog hair never gets into a bag of cheese-its. Cheeze-its? Now don't get me wrong, I like peas and broccoli and asparagus. I just like crackers and pudding more. Alas, eating pudding instead of peas makes you gain weight and die sooner. Honestly I don't mind the dying sooner part so much, less time looking through a glass darkly is all. But I don't want to live unhealthily, if that's a word. So instead of eating thinly sliced potatoes fried to a greasy yummy crunch, I'll eat some thinly sliced cucumbers and pretend I like them more than dying. :-D

Three lefts make a right.

So hopefully in that "turn turn turn" song you are turning to the left, so that you end up going right. Three rights make a left though, so whats better three rights and ending up left? Or three lefts and ending up right? I guess as long as you don't go with two wrongs to make a right you're doing ok? All I know is I feel pretty topsy-turvy right now. So many things I could do later. This blog is going to be an exercise in frustration I think...

Anyone in the mind reading business?

The beans. They are cool.

I made friends at the store today. What I mean is, I didn't do everything in my power to avoid contact with the other members of my species as was possible. I think it was short lived though. It happens to me, every few months maybe. For anywhere between a couple hours to...half a day. After that I guess I just run out of patience or benevolence or what have you. What do you have?

I may be thinking about kittens, and rainbows, and sunshine, and clouds shaped like happiness...but...
 
Sometimes kittens claw your face off. Sometimes rainbows come after [almost] everything on the face of the earth has been obliterated. Sometimes sunshine gives you 3rd degree sunburns. And sometimes clouds shaped like happiness...well I'm not sure how those could really be bad, it just went with the three things before it so sardonically. I suppose though, that even a cloud shaped like happiness could encompass an airplane causing it to deviate from its course at night and crash into an iceberg. Or something. Then it would be like the happy cloud of doom. H-COD.

Beware the loom of the happy cloud of doom. It looms. The cloud. It cools the air. It cools the beans.

Chain Blogging

1 person in the Netherlands has read my blog. A Netherlandian. Which kind of sounds like Neanderthal, but I'm sure the person in the Netherlandic region was a bright individual. 1 person in Luxembourg, 2 people in each the UK, Germany, and Australia, and 58 people in the USA have read it too.

Well, at least they clicked it and said "Oh, that's not what I wanted!" and clicked the back button. I'll pretend that you read it, loved it, and showed it to your dog. You may or may not have put a pancake on your dogs head in honor of my blog. You didn't show it to any of your friends or coworkers though, because you don't have any. If you did, you wouldn't be wasting time reading my blog...


I'm glad I'm not a lobster. If I was a lobster I'd want to be a wild lobster. That way, if I got caught in a net I might get to be on one of those crazy lobster fisherman reality shows. Captive bred lobsters though...they just sit on top of each other all day. I think its getting worse...when I was a kid I used to see all the little lobster dudes waving at me with their little bound lobster claws. Today I passed a tank and I'm pretty sure most of them were dead. Or at least playing dead in hopes of avert the gaze of the 4 year old kid thinking about banging on the tank to get it to look at him. Kids don't want dead things to look at them.

On the other hand lobsters don't have to worry about work, bills, school, or catching wayward chickens. You know what else lobsters don't have to worry about? Diets. Well, their own at least. They might be a little concerned with a diet that includes them on menu. Right now though, I'm trying to convince myself that this large glass of water is much more tasty than the bag of Cheetos in the kitchen. So far, I'm not buying it. You know what else I'm not buying? More clothes when my current wardrobe suddenly shrinks.

*takes a sip of water*

I think I'll go make myself a salad.

The end of the world...

We are born with nothing and we die with nothing. Why should life be any different? Anything we have is just above and beyond that "nothing". It doesn't take much to be more than nothing. So really no matter what we don't have, it doesn't merit complaining right?

Why does it sound so nice, but end up being so hard to accept.

Sometimes tomorrow is just...too soon. You think and think about something and it seems so far away that its just unreal enough to be ok. Then its tomorrow. And like the song, tomorrow is only a day away. Ready or not, here it comes. Well.

I believe I fall into the "not ready" catagory. But here it comes.

As the saying goes...

Let sleeping dogs lie.

If it ain't broke don't fix it.

If your car registration isn't wavering precariously by your car window as you drive 45 MPH down the road, don't try and move it.

What? That isn't a popularly known adage? Well it should be, if it was maybe I would have decided that tucked neatly between the visor and the ceiling of my car was actually a good place for my registration paper. Then maybe I wouldn't have had to walk up and down a mile of roadway looking for a white paper. There is a surprisingly large amount of white objects on the side of a road and its accompanying ditches. There are also not white paperlike things, like bottles, cigarette boxes, slippers and belts.

Oh well, I had been considering trying to ride my bike to work...

Bald eagles and you.

Driving back from 4 days of vacationing. Some of the highlights include:
• Seeing an American bald eagle soar fairly close almost directly over our head. It was beautiful, majestic even. It was a freaking bald eagle, like you see in books and on animal planet specials. Maybe some of you are privledged individuals with backstage passes to nature, but it was the first glimpse I'd ever seen of one. I hope its not the last.

We saw a lot of other wildlife while up near the wild blue yonder, a turtle, numerous fish, of course squirrels and birds, a rabbit that could have been someones pet roaming the wild northern riverside, several rather large and red headed woodpeckers that amusingly slammed their faces into wooden stumps, a lot of deer, about equal ratio of dead to alive ones, some raccoons, possums, and skunks. All of those were dead. Actually maybe more of the deer were dead. Anyways, I'm alive and presumably so are you.

• Another highlight, the lake! It was too cold for swimming, just right for canoeing and boating. Very pretty for looking at.

What else...
• The demon in the freezer. Not to be confused with the large ugly fish in the freezer, the demon is about smallpox, and it was written by Richard Preston. It was nice to read a 283 page book uninterrupted.

• There was this ventriloquist by the name of ...shoot, what was his name? David Pendleton. He was really really funny.

Lets see, that's all for now. It was a very relaxing vacation so there's not much more to tell, although anthrax, rabies, dirty comforters, smelly water, and my cell phone once again taking the fiery plunge was involved, all in all I'd say it was successful trip. Even though I'll never get my orange highlighter back.

History repeats itself.

So you'd better take notes. There's a lot of things that happened in history that I don't want to live through again. Heck, there's days that I look at the clock and realize that its only 9:30am and I think to myself, "Can I just start this day over? I've already screwed it up, and its still so early that if I could just start over maybe, just maybe, I could do it over and get it right."
Then I realize that the last thing I actually want to do is relive any of it.
But, in reality isn't that opportunity handed to us approximately every 24 hours? And how many days do I start out on the wrong foot off the wrong side of the bed? More than I care to admit. Maybe next time my 9:30 rolls around I can try to focus on making the next 12.5 hours of the day not like everything that happened before 9:30. Then maybe even if I start the next day on the wrong side of the bed, maybe I can manage to at least put the right foot down. Then maybe I'll be able to make it to 10:30 once in a while before screwing up.
So as many of my college bound friends could tell you, if you don't take notes, you're probably going to flunk some tests. If you don't study you're going to end up wasting a lot of money. If you can't remember anything you've learned when its test taking time, all the time and energy you spent studying is worthless.
So take notes. Remember. Review. Life is full of tests, and while they'll never stop coming, at least you can start getting higher marks. For me? I need to remember how God always seems to know just what is going on inside me. And even though I never ever deserve it he gives me what I need. I barely even ask Him for his help. But he graciously gives to me. Sometimes its a bitter medicine to swallow..like God telling us what he hates.

You know what I hate? Cilantro.
Makes me want to puke.







You know what God hates? My trying to be self-sufficient, failing, and becoming apathetic. Makes him want to puke.
Lastly...its Sunday again. God in his mercy and grace has seen fit to stir something in me again. Once again I beg him to keep me racing around the track. When I am weak, He is strong. And I am very, very weak. I don't know what God might want to remind you, but when he does, don't forget it.