Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Completely Pointless Ramblings

The semester is officially half over. Part of me is ecstatic-- I loaded way more on my plate than what I should have tried to carry this fall. Work, classes, and the constant and ongoing battle of assimilating into my own culture have proven to be a bit more taxing than I bargained for, so I'm relieved to know that I'm halfway there. At the same time, I'm way behind in several of my classes, and the midterm mark means that time for redemption is short.  I should probably be studying instead of blogging....

Fall break brought with it an opportunity to share a little about my summer with one of the churches that helped me go. It was a complete and total fiasco. The pews of the tiny country sanctuary were "packed" with about two dozen people. After much cajoling, I finally managed to convince my little brother to let me use his 32" flatscreen to show pictures on-- you can just plug a flashdrive into it and flip through the pictures on the screen. But because I'm Meg, I ran off and left Nashville without Pegasus (my computer), which had all of my pictures on it. Luckily, I had uploaded many of them to Walgreens.com and could just download them from there. Of course, the internet connection at my mom's was too sketchy to allow that, so I ended up dashing to a friend's house Sunday morning before church to pull the pictures off line. Just as I was downloading the last picture, something glitched and my entire flashdrive-- pictures, files, school papers, everything-- was completely wiped.

That's how I ended up standing nervously behind the pulpit in a tiny, beautiful country church, clutching a wrinkled scrap of paper with six hastily scrawled bullet points to talk about, and completely winging the entire presentation.  I had intended to use the pictures as my outline to help pace me, but I was going to have to rearrange my thoughts and sort of make it up as I went along. Two minutes later, I had already sped through my bullet points and was shifting anxiously from foot to foot as I desperately tried to think of a way to explain to these people what I saw and experienced there.  My flying thoughts settled on Jessie, and I told her story. Due to a combination of nerves, sleep deprivation, and my own emotional instability, I ended up crying (and so did most of the people in the pews). Then I opened the floor for questions, and by the time we were done, I had run over a solid 20 minutes. Just another morning in the life of Meg.

It was the first time I had shared anything about my summer experience with a group (and in retrospect, I'm glad it was a small and forgiving group). I really enjoyed it. Those kids deserve to have their story told. And I love any excuse to talk about them and brag on them, because they're pretty amazing little munchkins in my book. At the same time, it makes me really uncomfortable when people tell me how proud of me they are, or how brave I must be, or how great it is that I want to spend my life on the mission field.  It's not about me. I don't want it to be about me. It's not supposed to be about me.  And yet I'm stuck in this interesting and contradictory position where I have to ask for money (which I also hate doing... guess I'm gonna have to get over that, huh?) so I can go back to them.  Straighten me out here, cyberfriends-- I'm confusing myself.

In other news, the Cardinals are headed to the World Series. This means that my week will have a tinge of unquenchable giddiness to it no matter what. Also, despite oversleeping and being 45 minutes late to my 8am test, I'm pretty sure I managed to ace it in the 22 minutes I had left to take it. And my afternoon class got cancelled, so I can do something productive this afternoon, like sleep and paint. Probably not at the same time though.

Sorry for consuming two minutes of your life with my pointless and ineloquent ramblings, but to be fair, I warned you in the title...

For those of you keeping up with the count, I'm down to 6 months and 26ish days.  Assuming nursing school doesn't kill me first.

Much love!

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