Sat, Apr. 16
... Was it a morning like this
It's kind of funny to have the house so quiet. I'm the only one home, and I don't have a TV or radio on or anything. It's just silent. Peaceful. And oddly, for all the turmoil and changes that this week has brought, I'm feeling incredibly peaceful and quiet. Still.
I should spend some of my morning working on my scrapbook, but I really just want to curl back up in bed with a book, and veg. I have much scrapbooking to do in the next week, though, so I should get more pages done.
I went out for coffee with a friend from high school yesterday, and it was a good thing. We had a lot of fun, and a really good conversation, and I realized that, in many ways, he's the only person in my life from that era. I still have quite a few friends from my high school years, but most of them are church friends, and I don't keep in close contact with many people from school.
1998, 1999, and 2000 was a heady, exciting, rollercoaster, and there were so many things that were happening at school--God was doing incredible things, and we were just along for the ride. Things with the prayer group were on a high, there were amazing miracles happening on an almost daily basis, and we could see God's hand moving in an almost tangible way.
The whole thing affected all of us in so many different ways, and each of us walked away from the experience with a different outlook on it, but the point was that it somehow connected all of us in a strange and bizarre way.
This friend is one of the only people I'm still in touch with who was there for all of that--who remembers the entire story, start to finish--and it's cool to get together with someone who was there, and see how far we've come since. It's been 6, 7 years since all of that, and we've grown up a lot. The things we learned through that prayer group in high school have been extrapolated and expanded upon, and the lessons have been taken to an even more individual level.
It's one of those things that I don't think about on a daily basis anymore, but I know that so much of the foundation for what I learned during my years at RMC was laid during those years of high school. Faith became even more real and personal when I was in college, because I struggled through it more, and because it didn't come easily, but the high school years and the spiritual mountaintops then were a reference point that I could look back on. I could look at the past years, and see that God was moving and working, even when I didn't feel it. They were a milestone--an altar in the progression of my life, set aside as a remembrance to the glory of God.
I may have moved far past there in the past years, but I'm so thankful for those years. I'm thankful that God gave me those years and those people, and I'm thankful for the opportunity to sit down and revisit them every now and then. It's a good thing to enjoy the past. Not to dwell on it or live in it, but taking a trip back every now and then, and taking the time to appreciate it is a beautiful thing. Why else would God give us the gift of memory?
One year ago today: I didn't think it would end this way, but then again, I had no idea. Four years ago, I wasn't thinking about the end--I was revelling in the beginning. I wasn't thinking this far ahead. It was such a vague idea. Graduation. I had just graduated from high school--the idea that the next four years to a college grad could pass so quickly (or would even pass at all) was so foreign. In some ways, it didn't feel like this would ever come. It felt like I would just be there forever, and things would just stay the way they were.
infinite || abyss
posted at 8:25 a.m.
