Better.

Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers from my post this morning. It HAS been a dry time for me lately, and Thursday night was sort of the low-point over the last few months. That said, it felt incredibly nice to actually talk (write) about the struggles that I'm going through right now, because I don't do that in real life. In real life, everything's "fine" pretty much all the time. So it's nice that this blog can act as a way for me to vent some of my frustrations. However, I also don't want this blog to make it seem like everything in my life is bad. I certainly don't take time out of my day to blog about everyday blessings nearly as often as I should, and so I'm making a concerted effort to do that. And there WERE many things that happened today that were blessings.

-We got to spend time with Kait before she goes back to Arkansas, as well as her whole family. Yesterday was her dad's 49th birthday! And it was just so wonderful hanging out at her parent's house tonight. Their house always feels like I'm spending time at home.

-While I was over there, I learned that Kait's sister Meg has started a Bible Study called Simply Faith. Basically, it's a group of people that gather together to study, sing, and worship. But here's the catch--no electricity. It's done by candle-light, and no electronics of any kind are allowed--no cell phones, and only acoustic guitars. The goal is to bring the focus back to God, and His word. Not the show or the pretense.

And get this...the Bible Study is on Thursday nights! Which is great! I feel like I will finally have something to do on Thursday nights, and I have been telling Justin that I really want to find a Bible Study with other people our age, even if they're from a different church than the one that we attend. This is EXACTLY what I need spiritually--it reminds me so much of Holden Evening Prayer that we used to do in college, which is by far my favorite worship experience I have ever been involved in.

-Lisa. My dear, sweet Lisa. I've mentioned before that she was an absolutely fantastic roommate for me to have because she balanced me out so perfectly. I was the worrywart, and she was the one that went with the flow, and convinced me that it wasn't worth worrying over. You may have noticed that she left me a comment to the previous post entirely in Spanish. There was this song that I learned in high school spanish called "La Vida Es Un Carnaval" sung by both Celia Cruz and Isaac Delgado. We used to listen to Delgado's version ALL THE TIME. There's one portion of the song that I love, and it goes like this:

"Todo aquel que piensa que la vida siempre es cruel, tiene que saber que no es asi, hay tan solo momentos malos, y todo pasa. Ay, no hay que llorar, que la vida es un carnaval, y es mas bello vivir cantando...."

Roughly translated, it means "Everyone who thinks that life is always terrible needs to know that it isn't that way--there are only bad moments, and they all pass. Life is a carnaval, and it's better to go through life singing." What a perfect reminder for me right now.

I couldn't find the same version by Isaac Delgado that we used to listen to, but I did find a YouTube video of a couple doing the Samba to a similar version of the song for the Latin American version of "So You Think You Can Dance". Check it out....I can't help but smile whenever I listen to this song.