so...

I'm now the girl who passed out on the concrete floor at the quarterly company meeting and had to be taken to the emergency room for a few stitches. Which is REALLY good to be when you're the two-week-old intern.

No worries folks, I just have a pretty awesome bruise on my jaw where my stitches are. I got the day off of work, and lots of sympathy :) You know it's good when both of your bosses pick you up from the hospital and take you home.

A few tips I've learned from experience today:

1) Eat more than cereal for breakfast.
2) Drink LOTS of water, not just a little bit.
3) Don't lock your knees when you have to stand at the back of a presentation for a long time.
4) If you start to feel warm and dizzy, SIT DOWN. The fall will be a lot shorter.
5) If you want to be more than just the lowly nameless intern in the basement, black out in front of everyone in your company except the president (who had just left and will likely hear about it) and get taken off in an ambulance.
6) Try to sit down if you're being shown videos of a surgery. Even if you're not squeamish about blood, a combination of several of the above problems might take you out.
7) Have a sense of humor when you completely humiliate yourself.
8) Work for the kind of supervisors who will drive to the hospital, sit with you, and take you home (which I do) and with the kind of people who will call you to see if you want to go get ice cream after they get off work since you're new in town and don't know many people (also, I do).

Fortunately, I am blessed to work for great (and compassionate) people who are really concerned about me and just want me to get better. So for now I'm just going to eat lots of mashed potatoes and soup and get my 5 stitches out in a few days.

Oh, and for the record...I'M NOT PREGNANT (this is the first question at least 10 people will ask you if you pass out and go to the hospital). Just in case you were wondering.

:)

boulder

I've been living in Boulder, Colorado for a little over two weeks now...crazy, isn't it?

I have a phenomenal roommate, Katie. We haven't crossed paths a whole lot recently, but I'm really looking forward to staying with her this summer. I live just a few blocks away from the pedestrian mall downtown and within walking distance from a ton of cool stuff. My job is amazing and I'm learning more than I ever thought I would with a great company. The view all the way home from work is a panorama of beautiful mountains just a couple of miles away.

I love it here. Everything is beautiful, you can walk five minutes to the base of a mountain to hike, bikes are everywhere, everyone's healthy and loves the outdoors, the city is clean and sunny most of the time (except today when the weather is disgusting), the pedestrian mall downtown is always full of people, the community atmosphere is really awesome. And as much as I love it here...I'd never live here long-term.

It's awesome to be here for now. I have an amazing job that I've unofficially been re-offered for next summer, as well as a really great living situation that might even be open again next summer as well, and I'm really enjoying the whole feel of this place. But I also know that it's probably not going to be my home in 10 years. I can't really explain that, but I'm realizing that not every decision you make or every job you start or every place you move to has to be long-term. Some things are just meant to be temporary parts of your life that you enjoy, thrive in, learn from, and move on.

I love learning and having new experiences and absorbing life around me, and I've never learned more in such a short amount of time. I've been spoiled with supervisors who take lots of time out of their really busy days to literally mentor me and make sure I'm challenged but not overwhelmed. People here are really...different...and you can learn something from all of them. It is really different without actually feeling that different.

More updates are coming soon...meanwhile, I've become an old person with a full-time job who can no longer stay up late. Goodnight friends, I miss you!!!

dreams

I've learned that what you dream of rarely turns out the way you plan it or imagine...sometimes better than you could ever expect, sometimes you get disappointed. But here it is - what I dream of for my life.

~A life fully devoted to my Savior. Every morning waking up, as my mom would say, with a song of worship in my heart and in my head. Seeing God's hand move in the lives of the people around me, and watching him infuse our lives with his reality and his tangible/visible presence. I won't compromise this one.

~Leaving this world with the love of one man, a relationship that above all else has pointed me consistently in the direction of the true divine romance, still a very real part of me after years of the world cutting in. Serving and adoring and being pursued by my best friend. Fighting for it. And being able to look my husband in the eye seventy years from now and say that he's still the greatest and most passionate love affair of my life and that our wedding day was the most distant we ever felt from each other from that point on.

~I want to adopt children. Don't ask me how many, I don't know. But children who have no family need excesses of love, and that is one thing I can give them in abundance.

~Turning a highly-paid, grossly mis-motivated industry into a career with a purpose to serve and aid and love people the way Jesus loves them.

~Being surrounded by people I respect, love, and am challenged/encouraged by on a daily basis. Basically having amazing friends, and not just while I'm in college and unmarried.

~Having a dog. Not any time soon, but I really like the idea of a morning walk with my dog. Not tiny sissy dogs - "robust" enough to still be a respectable and outdoor activity-loving canine, but not so big he won't be perfectly happy with me hugging him all the time. I'm a cuddler. I expect my dog to be. Is that so much to ask?

~Having adventures. Exploring. Traveling. Pushing my own limits from time to time. Trespassing.

Did I say that?

~Staying healthy and enjoying life outside of my living room. I'm actually kind of the outdoors type. Surprise!

~Having a close-knit family. My kids are going to be really good friends with their cousins. I'm going to talk to my brother regularly and we're going to spend holidays together. No matter where I am or what country my mom's in, I'm never going to be too old to be her little girl or to need her advice. All of that is kind of (very) important to me.

~I plan on singing until the day I die. All for Jesus. I made that commitment years ago.

~I want to be the best mom of all time. I have a really high standard to live up to...thanks Mom, you made my job harder :)

~I don't ever - EVER - want to stop believing that anything is possible, or that life is good, or that I should be an idealist.

Ephesians 3:20-21

it's a small world after all...

I am so thankful for technology and easy communication and freedom of travel.

Because of all of that, I can successfully keep up a relationship from 1500 miles away (coming up on six months in about 11 days...hip hip hooray!). Because of it, I am spending the summer getting awesome experience and learning from some ridiculously brilliant people half a country away. Because of it, I can go experience the world and make decisions on my own while knowing that if and when my family needs me, I'm just a plane ride away. I can live my own life and still call my mom every night for advice if I need to.

Maybe it takes the daunting difficulty out of striking out on your own. I'm pretty sure I'm ok with that.

:)

worth

The best things in life have “do not enter” signs on them.

Whether that’s because there’s a certain thrill and sense of adventure in challenging the rules that makes the forbidden seem sweeter or because it actual IS better, I can’t say. I do know that if you want something to be left alone, don’t try to lock it up tight or put up warning signs – you’re just tipping potential trespassers off to the location of what they want.

So, where to go with this…

Sometimes the best things in life are the hardest to get to. The things that are carefully guarded by expenditure of time and effort. The things you can’t get unless you are willing to face failure. The things you’ll never notice if you spend your whole life focused on the next step in your forward progression towards some vague and elusive ideal of happiness in the future while neglecting the opportunities all around you.

The things that not everyone is willing to sacrifice for.

The things that not everyone is aware of.

The things that make the effort, the time, the fears, the risks, and the losses all worth it when you finally get behind the closed door.

What’s worth it to you? Why not go after it that much harder, knowing that nothing truly worth the effort requires none.

permanent motion

"What is fundamentally important to you creates motion."

I heard that several years ago, and I remembered it because it didn't make a whole lot of sense. Lots of things create motion in my life simply because I worry that if I don't DO them, the lack of doing will ruin everything. They aren't what really matters to me.

But that's not what that statement means. Some things in life create violent motion that stops when the momentum dies. They don't push hard enough. Others -- the important ones that matter -- create permanent motion. Some people, professors maybe, push and you study for a test for six hours (and that seems really important at the time). Some people say one word that alters the choices you make for the next six years, who keep you coming back time and time again to the things they taught you without realizing it.

Some people were meant to shake you up for a while, few were meant to permanently and persistently knock you off your feet.

You can't always control situations in life, or who enters or exits it. Sometimes they make a huge positive or negative impact that you weren't expecting. Don't get fixated on the temporarily spectacular, thinking that it will last. Instead find those who will gently but unyieldingly push you in the right direction, challenge you quietly, whose very presence creates a desire to move forward and become more than you are.

Temporary impact goes a long way at this point in life. Everything feels so urgent and fundamentally life-altering. But it's a ripple effect...one event that creates temporary turbulence. Never confuse it for the waves, the subtle but powerful things that will keep you moving after the ripples are gone.

paint your picket fence

Somewhere along the way, the American dream became less about the white picket fence and a middle class job. Instead of aspiring to a life with all of your choices made easier for you, we instead hope for the ability to make MORE choices.

The beauty of abundant higher education is that you can choose what you want to be educated in. As time has gone on, students have discovered that you never really even have to be locked into the major you chose first (or second, or fifth...even if it's been three or four years...who wants to leave college anyway??). You can choose to get any of a variety of graduate degrees, even if they have nothing to do with what you studied in undergrad. You can choose any state you'd like to live in, any spouse you'd like to marry, whether or not to switch to someone else's spouse mid-game, no children or twelve, a job with NASA or on Wall street or learning how to scuba dive to clean the tanks at the local aquarium (I didn't make that up). You can choose anything.

Fewer and fewer people care about keeping up with the Joneses, because that means making the same choices as the Joneses. Everybody wants to be able to make their own choices. A really great option might become hideous in the eyes of someone being forced to take it. Happiness is being increasingly defined by the variability of your life, and how free you are to change it (whether you want to, or plan to, or not).

Don't get me wrong, people still kind of like the white picket fence. They just really like knowing they could paint it metallic periwinkle if they so desired.