I Can Already Tell This Break is Going to be Too Short

I kicked off my break by going down to Houston Saturday, then to Galveston Sunday to spend a night. This picture makes it look really good, doesn't it? (No, I didn't take it...) But it's all the beach I'll probably get this summer and for a long while, so I'll have to take what I can get. I wish we could have stayed longer and actually enjoy the sun for a while.

Day one of break was a lot of laundry, cleaning, and sewing. I have a lot of quilt deadlines coming up: birth, graduation, birth, wedding, possibly a camp reunion, and two births I'm already behind on!

Day two, so far, much of the same.

I keep checking my email praying for a message about grades being posted for one class in particular, but no news. Don't know if that's good or not.

Even though this break is short, there is the promise of a longer one later this summer, so I must be patient.

Getting Back on Track

From John Piper's Hunger for God:


The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie.
It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite for
heaven, but endless nibbling at the table of the world. It is not
the X-rated video, but the prime-time dribble of triviality we
drink in every night. For all the ill that Satan can do, when God
describes what keeps us from the banquet table of his love, it is
a piece of land, a yoke of oxen, and a wife (Luke 14:18-20). The
greatest adversary of love to God is not his enemies but his gifts.
And the most deadly appetites are not for the poison of evil, but
for the simple pleasures of earth. For when these replace an
appetite for God himself, the idolatry is scarcely recognizable,
and almost incurable.
...

“The pleasures of this life” and “the desires for
other things”—these are not evil in themselves. These are not
vices. These are gifts of God. They are your basic meat and potatoes
and coffee and gardening and reading and decorating and
traveling and investing and TV-watching and Internet-surfing
and shopping and exercising and collecting and talking. And all
of them can become deadly substitutes for God.

***A ton of his books are available for free download on his website: I like free!***

Almost Done, But Not

Three and a half days to go of second year and finals are in full swing. Last week we did full mouth extractions on my removable pt and today I will hopefully remove sutures. Impressions this summer and he should have teeth by the fall. A long time to go without teeth, I know.

This will be my first real break in a long time. Spring break doesn't count and wasn't long enough. I'm really looking forward to this time to do some re-centering. Re-focusing. Re-evaluating. Some real mission-statment making kind of stuff like I used to take my senior Bible study girls through before they went off to college. Every now and then you just have to take stock and it's been a while for me. The way some things have gone lately has made that painfully obvious and it's about time this is done. I mean spiritually, I mean physically, I mean dentally. Especially before I really kick it up a notch and throw a bunch of patients in the mix. It's only gonna get crazier...