*Disclaimer* This weeks bog post isn’t going to be super deep or have immense spiritual meaning, and it probably will not be as carefully written as some of my other posts, but is should be an entertaining one. This is a collection of short incidents that have happened in my life over the past few weeks, that have taught me a little about life and godliness (well, maybe they didn’t teach me godliness, but at least a little common sense). I hope you enjoy this little peek into my life!
Episode #1: The Mystery of the Missing Keys.
Ask anyone I know and they will tell you that I am notorious for being forgetful. I can tell you the names of all the ancient Greek tyrants in order, but I can’t for the life of me remember practical things – what I had for breakfast, what time my advising meeting is, or where I put my headphones. This being said, the fact that I misplaced a key ring with my mailbox key and the key to a trunk I own is not surprising. What is surprising is what I had to go through to find it.
But let’s back up a little bit to the day I realized the keys were missing. It was an ordinary Friday, and I was about to head to the dinning hall for lunch. My roommate asked me if I could check her mailbox for her while I was near the mail room (as the mail room and the dinning hall are connected), and I agreed, scrounging around my mildly cluttered desk for my keys, intending to check my mailbox as well. Coming up empty handed, I checked in several of the bags I usually carry around campus, figuring I had put my keys in one of those and forgotten to take them out. No luck.
I shrugged. Oh well. I was always loosing things, so I didn’t think much of it- the keys would turn up soon enough.
However, as the days passed with no keys to be found, I started to get antsy. My birthday was coming up, and I knew people would be sending me letters. I needed to find my mail key. Thus the true search began. I started pulling things out of bags to look in them and checking the pockets of ever coat, jacket, and pair of pants I owned, even the shorts that I had not worn in months. I dug through the bins under my bed, and looked in every nook and cranny, behind bookshelves and under desks, but came up with nothing. I even enlisted the help of my roommate to try to locate the elusive keys, but with no success. I was starting to get desperate. Irrational thoughts crowded my mind. I loved getting mail- what if I was never able to check my mail again?!?!?
My birthday came and left, still with no sign of keys anywhere. I checked at the lost and found on campus. Nothing. I tried to remember the last time I had used the keys. Nothing. I was praying everyday that the Lord would show me what I had done with my keys, but I still came up empty. At this point, I had resigned myself to a sad, mail-less life.
On Thursday, about a week after my keys had disappeared, I embarked on my routine laundry expedition, armed with quarters, detergent, and a hamper full of dirty clothes. I absentmindedly shoved my clothes into the washer, poured the detergent in, and popped 6 quarters into the slot one by one. As I turned to leave the laundry room, I felt something (or, should I say, someone) stop me. There was no audible voice, angelic messenger, or fireworks, but suddenly I just knew: the keys were somewhere in the room. I turned slowly, scanning the room, and low and behold, there they were, sitting in the corner of the windowsill. They must have fallen out of my pants pockets the last time I washed clothes, and someone was kind enough to leave them on the windowsill for me to find. There was no doubt in my mind- If the Lord had not stopped me, I would never have thought to look in the laundry room, and I probably would never have found the keys.
I burst back into my suite to find my suite-mate working on homework in our living room. “Kathleen,” I shouted excitedly, ” You will never guess what the Lord just did for me……”
Lessons learned: Trust in the Lord and always put your keys away in the same place!
Episode #2: Bad Day Blues
I think it is safe to say that we have all had one of those days where everything that can goes wrong does go wrong. I had a day like this last Wednesday.
The day started out with an email informing me that I didn’t get a callback for the Spring musical, for the fourth semester in a row. (Not to mention that everyone else in my acting class did get a callback, meaning that I would have to suffer through a class period of excited, giddy actors all talking about their auditions.) Great. Let the self-deprecating anxiety and sadness begin.
From there on, the day started to unravel as I botched my monologue presentation, which I had been working on for weeks, took a grueling history exam and got a lower-than-expected grade, and wasted an hour of time waiting for a tutee who never showed up to his tutoring appointment. All of this had left me feeling exhausted, depressed, and lonely, not to mention, insecure in my own talent and purpose. And now, to top it all off, I was walking across campus in the rain with no umbrella. Cue the sad violin music!
While I was in the midst of wallowing in my self-pity, I got a text, and suddenly my whole outlook on the day changed. An acquaintance of mine, a girl in one of my online classes, shared that she had not only failed the exam that day (the same exam I took), but on her way home she had been rear ended by a drunk man in a pick up truck, and while she was, by the grace of God, mostly unharmed, her car had been totaled. Now she would have no way to get from her apartment to campus to take classes, and she risked failing her classes.
“Wow, ” I said, “And I thought I was having a bad day. She has it so much worse. I can’t imagine having to deal with the stress of a totaled car, especially at this time of the semester.”
While my day did not get any better after that, I walked around with a new sense of perspective. Maybe it was a bad day, but it could be worse, and I had the Lord to help me make it through. Though pain lasts for a night, joy comes in the morning.
Lessons Learned: #1-No matter how bad things get, there is always someone out there who has it worse, so don’t act like you are the only one who ever struggles. #2- Don’t put your worth in what you do, because if you do badly, everything falls apart. Find your identity in who God says you are instead.
Episode #3: The NyQuil Nightmare
This story makes me sound like an idiot, but I promise you, I am quite intelligent as long as I don’t have to deal with medicine! My NyQuil nightmare started out on Monday, as I was just starting to get over a cold. Now, I tend to be a fairly healthy person and I don’t often get sick; even when I do contract an illness, my symptoms are usually mild and short-lived, and this cold was no exception. I had had a sore throat and some sniffles and congestion, but nothing life-shattering.
On Monday when I woke up, all my other symptoms had disappeared, but the sniffles had intensified dramatically. My nose was running like a freight train, and by mid-morning I had already gone through a small container of tissues with no end in sight. It was getting to the point where I could not focus on anything, since I stopped every few minutes to blow my nose, and I still had three classes that day for which I had to pay attention. (Don’t worry, they were all online classes- no infection being spread here!) I decided I needed to take some sort of medicine, if only to get through my classes.
Something you need to know about me is that I am the type of person who doesn’t take medicine unless I absolutely have to. I usually just let sickness run its course and let my body heal itself, so it makes sense that I only brought a small amount of medicine with me to school. I had one bottle of medicine for pain and one bottle of NyQuil for flu-like symptoms.
I chose the NyQuil.
Now before you inwardly groan at my stupidity, you have to know that this wasn’t a rash, uninformed decision. I am well aware that NyQuil contains chemicals that cause drowsiness and help you sleep. However, my body tends to not react to sleep-inducing drugs, and so over half of the times I had taken NyQuil in the past, I had felt no drowsiness at all. Even in the times when this medicine had made me sleepy, it wasn’t too bad, and usually didn’t put me to sleep. So, after weighing my options, (NyQuil or nothing), I took the NyQuil.
At this point, you can probably guess what happened next: Within 20 minutes I started to feel drowsy. At first I wasn’t sure what was going on; I just felt sort of heavy. By the 40 minute mark, the NyQuil had hit me with the full force of its strength, and all my energy was completely sapped. I was struggling to keep my eyes open, and every movement was labored- It took an eternity just to move my head or lift my arms. Whenever I stood up, the room felt like it was spinning around me, and I couldn’t even walk in a straight line. Normally, I would have abandoned hope of doing anything for the rest of the afternoon, and just given into sleep, but as previously mentioned, I had three important classes I had to attend.
Having never done drugs, I don’t know what a substance-induced high feels like, but I have a feeling it might have felt something like this. I could not focus. As I sat in my online classes, trying to keep myself awake by taking notes on the extremely important information that was being presented, I was struggling to understand and write down even the most simple concepts. And spelling things correctly- you can forget about that. But the worst side effect by far was that I could not control my facial expressions, which in turn made me super giggly. At one point when I thought I had my face under control, my unsuspecting roommate walked in, stared at me for a second, and asked, “Are you on drugs?”
Needless to say, I passed out and took a nice 1 hour nap as soon as my classes were over!
Lessons Learned: Never take NyQuil in the middle of the day! Just keep other medicine on hand!
Soli Deo Gloria 