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| Taking the time to remember this week just how blessed I really am. |
If I’m being completely honest here, I would have to admit
to you that this week has been a rough one.
It’s been a good one, yes, and I cannot tell you how blessed I have been
in so many ways by the people I have come to know and really love here. But,
you know, if I were to say it has been without its massive struggles that would
have been a lie. It got to the point where
I just had to stop and break down into tears. And I don’t do that very often. At
all.
It’s that point in the term where you begin to realize
just how much you have to do before the term ends and the daunting presence of
all those projects begins to really take its toll. The deadlines for those big
papers and projects begin to appear on the horizon and all those group projects
begin to really show their true colors as to who is doing their part, and who
is not. The group for my Coral Reef class met up to talk about who was writing
which part of the essay. My marine mammal research proposal group came together
and finally settled on a topic and began researching the main points. My
vertebrate fauna group began submitting in portions of the project in
preparation for final compilation. The
massive essay I am writing for Wildlife Management finally started to take a fairly
solid form. It’s been nothing, nothing, nothing for so long and then it just
seems like all the big assignments that can either make or break my grade
finally get thrown in. And I think that’s where it started.
Friday I made a call in to my parents and we finally nailed
down some dates and plane tickets for travelling around when they get here. Just
the process of figuring all that out got to be pretty stressful. All together I
think it took us 3 ½ to figure out just
the part that we did. And there’s still more!
My mom told me that my horse had decided to be an escape artist
again (Oh Toby...) and had broken out of the pasture, impaling himself on
a fence post in the process. He’s fine, thank goodness, but he is currently unridable and has a good number of stitches in his side now. The internet at the lodge has been ever more
frustrating and though we have had the internet guy come out about 3
times and even had the router replaced once, it still decides to stop working at the most
inopportune moments. Every time I do homework I have to grab all I need offline for fear it will give out again, and every time I Skype I have to call back somewhere around 10 times in between bad connections.
Saturday I started having troubles with my computer while writing that big paper I was talking about and after spending 2 hours trying to fix
it, I finally just decided to restart the thing. Then popped up that ever joyful black and
white screen of death with counting numbers and I just said heck with it and
gave a call back to a couple of my friends to take them up on their earlier offer to go out around town for the day.
Sunday I decided I was going to finally get a
lot of stuff done and got cracking again on my Wildlife Management report. It
was about that time I realized with sinking dread that all the data I had
previously spent hours working on had all been done wrong and I would have to
do it all again. That was about when I cried.
But you know, it’s at times like these that I realize the
flip side of life in that everything can’t always be butterflies and rainbows
(well… obviously…). I mean if everything was always great and nothing bad every
happened, would we really ever appreciate the good things in life that do
happen? How would we ever be able to say that the good things were good if we
had never seen the bad to know the difference?
That's why that despite all the frustration that I went
through I can say that in the end, the week was good. Rough maybe, but good. When my computer was showing
the signs of impending doom and eventual death, one of my housemates offered me
a spare computer to work on and when times got even more frustrating looked up
and simply said “Here, eat some chocolate.” When the internet guy came to check
in on the internet router again he happily agreed to take a look at my computer
for me and give me suggestions on where I can go from here. When I had had enough of all my frustrations
and just needed to get out of the house, two of my friends took me out into
town to hang out and we spent time baking and just chatting about life. When the frustrations and discouragements of life got
so bad that I cried, Michelle came over and gave me a heartfelt hug, making sure I knew it was ok to mess up and things would get better. Later on she left a note in my room saying how blessed she
was for knowing me and thanking me for letting her see even the not so good
sides of me.
It’s at times like these that I really see how blessed I
am and just what kinds of people I am surrounded by. I cannot thank God enough for the grace
He has given me and the forethought that He gave into putting all these people in
my life. People that five months ago I
knew nothing about but now can’t bear the thought of leaving when my time here
comes to a close. I may be on the
adventure of a lifetime right now, but sometimes it’s good to remember the “life” part in
that at the end, it’s not always an easy road to follow.
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