Happy and Glorious and Wonderful

Last semester was rough. This semester will also be difficult, though God has blessed me with a great deal of healing. He is gracious and gentle with me. A couple days ago, everything was looking bleak. I couldn't put my finger on why, but it felt as if the sky was falling and that my room was the only safe place, despite how lonely it was. THEN! Lo and behold, I remembered a beautiful thing.

One of my dearest friends (the heart behind writing on my hand for those of you who read it) knew that this semester was going to be difficult and gave me one of the most beautiful gifts I have ever received.  She took paint chips and wrote quotes, words of encouragement, scripture verses, inside jokes, and funny little blurbs, put them all into an envelope, and put them into my hands. I have never felt so blessed. This particular day I reached into the envelope for one of the very last cards thinking "God, life feels as though it's falling apart and I don't see the joy...show me the joy."

This is what I pulled from the envelope:

If anyone has any doubts as to whether God is creative, whether He has a sense of humor, or whether He has a personal relationship with each of His children, here is evidence that He does. Though, the first two I believe have no better proof than the fact that the Platypus exists.

So. Here are the happy, glorious, and wonderful things I remembered and happily crafted out of words:

When I was a little girl, my family home schooled. We lived on a sweet, safe, and happily boring street in Sunnyvale, California near San Jose. With the size of the house, all three of us children shared a bedroom that was neat and tidy. We each had a box for our personal belongings and a rainbow traveled around the top of our bedroom wall.

Life was predictable. Cheerios for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, and my daddy home for dinner.

I often think of the summers we had in those early days. We would pack up the car, drive out of the hot concrete landscape, and find ourselves somewhere where you couldn't see any buildings except for the small bathhouse. It would always look so close until night had fallen and my little brother needed to be taken to the bathroom in the dark.

My father, a sailor without an ocean at the time, reveled in setting up the tent in a formulated, taught, and generally ship-shape way. It wasn't until I went camping with friends much later that I learned that putting up a tent could be a simple business.

I never worried about bears or wild creatures when we were camping because I knew I had my glinting little Swiss army knife (it seemed so threatening then) in the mesh pocket over my head. It seemed as though all we needed to survive was a box of matches, a Swiss army knife, and the biscuits my mom made in the dutch oven.

The other place I felt grown up in besides the woods was in the little ballet studio I took classes in at about age seven. I overlooked how my mother walked me into class and focused instead on how I must look just like the dancers I saw every year with my dad. We always went tot he Nutcracker for my December birthday and to the old Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers films. The brilliant color of the ballet and the elegant black and white of the theater impressed me. I decided that I would participate in that magic somehow, someday.