Change

:It's amazing, isn't it?:

You never realize it's happening until you think about where you've come from, how you came to this point, or the steps you've taken to get here. You continue living your life, unawares, and suddenly all this change gives you a nice right punch, and you are forced to dazedly reminisce of the life you once had.

I write about change quite a lot. I've said it before, but I'll say it again: we are so preoccupied with change. It's fascinating and terrifying and exhilarating... But completely necessary. Even as I write this, I am a little overwhelmed with how much has changed between my last post and the one you are reading right now.

Every once in a while, I'll go back to those older posts and remember how life was compared to how life is now. It is so interesting to me to watch how my attitude has been changing over the past two-and-a-half-years. Wow. Two-and-a-half years. That's insane to me. It feels like just yesterday I was sitting down at my desk in my dorm room in Galloway Hall at Mount Vernon Nazarene University to write these blog posts.
I have just realized that I have not stepped foot onto MVNU's campus in two years. It doesn't feel like very long ago I was struggling through the spring semester of my freshman year.

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Life... is so sweet, but so incredibly stressful from time to time. I considered naming this summer "The Sweltering Summer of Stress: Twenty-Eleven Edition" simply because it has been THE most epically stressful summer of my life thus far. I thought last summer was bad; this summer is even worse. I find it ironic that my summers--when I'm supposed to be on vacation, recovering from constant classes--have become more stressful than my semesters. I think I work too much.

This summer has made me realize, however, how vital and important relationships are to one's mental, emotional, spiritual, and, yes, even physical health. The pace of my job is such that I do not have the time to have friendships, and it has begun to drain the life out of me. That sounds completely exaggerated and dramatic, but if you work 60 hours a week you know what I'm talking about. It becomes so difficult to feed life into other people when there's nobody feeding into you. It's like... trying to be a candle flame in a vacuum. You can't burn bright when there's no oxygen to help you.

My fiancee has this incredible ability to stay optimistic through nearly everything. I don't know how he does it. Optimism must be his spiritual gift. Anyway... There are times when I find myself wanting to complain all the time, snap at people just because things aren't going so well in my head, or just throw myself a pity party because I can, especially during summers like this one. Then Jeremiah reminds me that doing any of those things will get me nowhere. He says being optimistic is the most logical path to take, because being a pessimist achieves absolutely nothing. He tells me to always hope for the best: in situations, in people, in decisions; but expect the worst. Yep. I'm marrying a very smart man.

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God is opening up some kind of door or a window for me somewhere. I can just feel it coming. Thank you, Jesus.