Sing Me To Sleep.

Hello again, big blogging world. Summer is on its way out, and I'm not close to being ready for it to be over.
I've got Chrysalis tomorrow. It's a Christian retreat type thing for girls. I've heard so many great things about it that I'm completely glad to finally be going.

The weird thing is, whenever I scheduled it..I remember thinking "that'll pretty much be the last thing I do this summer."
And now it's here.


However, this has been an improvement on last summer. So I won't complain.

It's been a strange last seven days or so. Lots of emotions, but I am pretty sure I can partially blame that on hormones.
I had a little epiphany, and I thought I'd share.

It was about two a.m. and I was sitting in my bed. Thinking that I could count on one hand the people that are close to me that haven't dissapointed me.. getting all apathetic and depressed. Then, like someone had slapped me, I realized how completely stupid I was being.
I mean, duh.
Human beings are going to dissapoint me, because that's what they are. What I am. A dissapointing, fleshly, shallow person. There's only one person that ever walked this planet that would never dissapoint me, and I fall short of His glory every single second.



On a completely different note, I've been thinking a lot about pride lately. How much is too much? For instance, I hold my reputation in high regard, because I've worked so dang hard on keeping it clean. I'm proud to claim my goody-goody label. But has the thing itself overtaken my orginal reasoning behind it? Am I so worried about upholding my reputation that I've forgotten about why it even matters? Does this make sense to anyone but me?

Still on the subject of pride, but in a different context..

A few days ago, I went out to my grandparent's house. My granddaddy used to be this big big man..I can remember not being able to get my little arms around his legs. Thinking to myself as a little girl that he looked like a tree, almost. I remember once he came to my school to give me my glasses, and everyone in my class went "Whoaahh. That man is a giant!"

And I was always his favorite. I think it's because I'm a carbon copy of my grandmother, his wife.

But he's a diabetic, and in the past few years he's lost use of his legs completely. He uses a wheelchair to get around, he can barely get up out of his chair by himself. His legs are no bigger than mine now. But that man's pride hasn't gotten any smaller. He refuses to be pitied.

Anyway, when I went out to his house last time, I washed his feet. The lack of circulation to them makes them swell and causes the skin to die. So I held the door as he rolled outside, and lowered the chair so his feet could sit in the tub of water.

He never looked me in the eyes. I had to pick his legs up to move them, and he kept talking about the dog, the trees. Anything.

The whole time I kept thinking about Jesus washing his disciple's feet. How humbling it was, to wash the feet of this great man that had stood so tall. To see this man who could once throw me up in the air and catch me, struggling to lift himself.

I finished, dried his feet off, and put them back up onto the footrest of his wheelchair. He looked at me and said "I appreciate you doing this, baby."
Then he rolled back inside.
And to me, he looked just like the big man he'd been.



I think that pride is good in the right amounts. Having pride in yourself, your body for instance. Good.
But too much pride can be blinding. You can grow ungrateful, haughty.

Life's all about balance, I think. Balancing pride with humilty, seriousness with humor. And so on and so forth.
...

I hope that this weekend retreat teaches me something I need to learn. I hope I uncover some new something in my Christian walk.
If you're the praying kind, send up a few for me. And if you aren't the praying kind..try it out anyway.

Working on my balancing act,
Until next time,
Anna