Idle and Blessed

This week has been different. The girls moved out of the apartment yesterday - the apartment I've been living in a good chunk of the summer. Which is super weird, especially now that Anna has a ring on her finger and wedding planning has been taken to a completely new level. Bridesmaid dresses. Flowers. Colors. Ohandbytheway our lives are never going to be simple again. So I've been a Nashville wanderer the past four days, sleeping wherever I can find a friend's hospitality to allow me. Working every afternoon. I saw Anna and Luke the other day, just long enough to hear the proposal story and try on the sparkly rock to see how it looks on my left hand. I talked to Sarah on the phone a couple days ago, too, and finally got caught up on the last month or two of life. I cannot express how much I needed to talk to that girl. It's like life is normal again after that, at least for a few hours. Connecting with someone deeply, knowing someone deeply, is insanely rare. Aren...

For people who believe in heaven, we Christians sure don't talk about it much. I'm starting to wonder if we even care about heaven at all. Think about it. When was the last time you made a decision based on the reality that in an unknown number of years, the universe as we know it will be made into something new? I personally can't remember the last time I factored my beliefs about heaven into my daily life. Except maybe to comfort someone grieving death, we seem to think the afterlife isn't relevant to us now. At least, that's true for me. But in the past few months my convictions about heaven have shifted, because I've been thinking a lot about what exactly the Bible says about it. I don't get credit for this, because it's all Cory's doing -- he just had to go and actually read the Bible and actually preach on what it says. :) And what it says is not what we think it says. This idea of an actual place called heaven is a new one. It's not found ...

I'm slowly wrapping my mind around the fact that I'm leaving in three weeks. Plane tickets are purchased, support cards mailed, travel supplies and gifts mostly bought, and internship meetings are done. I'm looking forward to teaching English this year, visiting the orphanage, speaking Russian, and deepening relationships. But in the meantime, I'm soaking up these weeks of summer. My time is split between Nashville and Spring Hill, working, friends, family, sun, and rest. These days won't last forever. In fact, they end in part on July 1, when I move into my first apartment in Nashville. I won't live at home anymore in the summers. It's a weird time in life to feel like a chapter is closing, since I'm in the middle of college and everything, but I feel like this is a huge change. A good one, an exciting one, but definitely a change. And I don't like change very much. I don't like how some of my friends are getting married, graduating, or moving a...