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First of all it's a beautiful day.

This past Thursday Hannah and Amy, two of my dearest friends from freshman year, and two of the best people I've ever known, flew back into LAX after spending this whole school year in London with Pepperdine. We spent a lot of the three days we had together reflecting about how we've changed as individuals over the past two years of college and especially since this time last year, when we all happened to be having either a super big high or low. It's pretty cool how God gives us friends who just "get" us. I've made awesome friends this year while most of the people I hung out with last year have been overseas, but if we're being honest, I'm pretty sure zero of them are introverts. Hannah, Amy, and I totally get that about each other... totes a breath of fresh air.

Especially in the past six months, I have figured out so many things about myself and the way I understand and react to people, things, relationships, emotions, experiences, growth, temptation, discouragement, defeat, and a million other things that I try to jot down in this little notebook I carry around whenever I think of them. Several of my friends kept blogs this year, and whether it was to help them remember their day to day activities or served as an outlet for reflection. I found myself reading them every day. Here is my contribution, now that I am so much more aware of what I have to contribute.

On the list of latest obsessions: recognition of the chapters of life. Accepting that they exist and begin and end and some are more interesting than others but the the story would not be complete if it were missing any one of them. This chapter of being class president, waiting for people to return from overseas, discovering my interest in sociology, reveling in my most recent self-realizations and basking in the accomplishment of a particular set of hurdles: done. check. In a couple weeks I'll be heading to Memphis and starting my youth ministry internship- expecting it to be a fast-paced, hilarious at times, scary, exciting, eternally significant, fun, different chapter.

"Humans are alive for the purpose of journey, a kind of three-act structure. They are born and spend several years discovering themselves and the world, then plod through a long middle in which they are compelled to search for a mate and also create stability out of natural stability, and then they find themselves at an end that seems to be designed for reflection." A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Donald Miller

Today I'm thankful for prayer, sleep, sunshine, living life one sentence of the story at a time