Sometimes I forget how busy life at school can be. After lounging around my house in the mountains for a few weeks after returning to the States, it felt strange to suddenly jump back into classes, commitments, work, church, social life, etc.....hence the not blogging for a little while.
But today is a welcome and exciting pause because of SNOW, snow, snow! A couple of friends and I decided it wou
ld be more fun to get snowed in together for the weekend, so that's what we did as soon as the flakes started falling on Friday. We bundled up that evening and carried steaming mugs of coffee and warm chocolate chip cookies out into the snowy night. We went on a long walk around the neighborhood and
down the nearby highway, receiving some car honks from the few brave drivers who ventured out on the roads (I suppose three girls in pajamas walking in the dark through the pouring snow along the side of the road is a something you don't see everyday)! We slept in quite late the next day and then trekked back through the snow to a nearby grocery store for a late breakfast of homemade biscuits and sausage gravy. Nothin' warms you up faster!
Anyway, it's been an interesting first few weeks of school. It's really strange to be a senior. It didn't really hit me at all in Scotland, but being back here and knowing it's my final semester feels very odd. It was strange to have a last first-day of school, and to know that these classes would be my last for at least a while. I feel weirdly separated from the freshmen and sophomores I meet, knowing that this college experience stretches out ahead of them, but that it's over for me. The nice thing about college is that you always have a template for your life, a pattern and a structure for your days, months, and years. To some extent, you always know what's coming next. Now it feels like a long blank canvas is stretched in front of me with absolutely nothing on it.
I am blessed with some really interesting classes this semester. One of my favorites is "Literary Study of the Bible," because it means I always have some Bible reading to do as homework. Right now we're working our way through the Psalms and I feel continually amazed by their beauty, passion, masterful literary craft, and most of all how human and raw some of them all. There is no neat, happy, bow-on-top conclusion to something as intensely pain-stricken and vengeful as Psalm 137. My professor talked about how all human beings have a limit to the human suffering, complaining, and grief we can handle.....yet God seems to invite endless amounts of it on Himself. One of the strangest things about this semester is that most of my friends have graduated and moved away, so I come home many days after classes to evenings spent alone, which is really new for me. It is so comforting to remember that God can handle my loneliness and my most petty, selfish complaints without growing weary of me.
Another favorite new class is "Global Problems in Health." I'm taking this one just because the subject matter fascinates me. I often walk away from it with an incredibly heavy heart. This weekend as I read over my homework, this sentence hit me like a bullet: "Despite reductions in infant and child mortality, 30,000 children under five die each day from preventable causes." That figure is so staggering and makes me so angry. And all the issues below the health problems run so much deeper: poverty, poor infrastructure, low literacy rates, civil wars and unrest, widespread homelessness, corrupt leaders, and unstable governments. The immense lack of justice in the world is enough to make anyone want to weep. Issues of justice aren't just found in some remote third-world countries, either. In terms of socioeconomic status, the United States is the most unequal among developed societies. We have such extreme wealth and such abject poverty among us.
I've seen some of that poverty over the past couple of weeks as I've gone back to work with refugees. I went to pick up one man for an appointment at Social Services (a building which I am convinced is something akin to hell on earth), and when he opened the door to his small, dimly lit apartment, his family was sitting huddled under piles of blankets because it was so cold. I spent that morning wrangling with multiple Social Services workers on behalf of these two men who barely spoke English, wondering how people could ever do something like this on their own. How do people who cannot speak English ever navigate an insane bureaucratic system which sets up so many barriers to them getting much-needed help, when I could barely deal with it all as a college-educated native speaker? I went straight from doing that to sitting in a lecture on Contemporary Poetry that afternoon, and somehow it made my life seem very disconnected. I know higher education, literature, art, and beauty are all incredibly important, but sometimes they seem so disparate from this world of tangible, crucial problems. Why am I sitting and talking about why a poet chose a particular word in line 5 when I just left a family sitting in a cold, dark apartment on the other side of town?
Mmm, just look at these scrumptious Coffee Cake Muffins. I made these tonight in a recent kick to do more cooking from scratch-- thus far its been quite successful and satisfying. I also cooked a delicious Eggplant Parmesan for lunch today, which was going remarkably well until I smelled burnt paper and realized the corner of my cookbook was stuck and burning under a molten-hot frying pan. I guess all novice cooks are required to have some major kitchen disasters on the path to culinary mastery!
