Endings

So, school has been out for a few days now. Thank the Lord God Almighty. It was beyond time, I believe. It was without a doubt the hardest semester I've ever had. All I can say is, I'm glad I survived.

Now I feel like I can get into classes about stuff I really want to know. Stuff I will actually use. I'm looking forward to be able to possibly help people with what I'm learning. It's invigorating. I know I said before that I was sure about what I wanted to do, and was wrong. Twice. I do believe this is what I'm supposed to do. However, if it is not... I'm going to deal with it. Haha. Seriously, I can't change again. No more, promise.

Dick's Sporting Goods has taken over my life next week. I'm working Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Gah. I have to miss Nanny's Christmas lunch on Monday because of work! Boo that. And I won't get to see Lauren much while she's home. Boo that even more. At least I can remind myself that in January I'll be traveling to Oregon to snowboard!! :D I can't tell you how tempting it is to buy all the snowboarding equipment I can at work, especially since I get a discount.

Changing the tone entirely... We put Sandy down yesterday. We decided it was time. She had practically no feeling in one of her legs, and the other was barely responsive. She couldn't keep down anything she ate. She also seemed to be trying to get away by herself; she got stuck in the ditch several times a day week before last. The old saying that an old dog will go off by itself to die seems to hold true. We tried changing her medicine, but it didn't do much good. She was fifteen years old. That's crazy. She'd been with us for three fourths of my life. Poor girl. I hated to see her like that, because I remember how she used to be. I also remember Cajun and Magnum - Magnum, who we lost last year, and Cajun, who we lost the year before.

When we were having our house remodeled, Sandy would be right in the middle of the workers, begging for food. Magnum would walk all the way around the house when you called his name just to avoid running into any of the workers. Cajun was almost always penned up so that she wouldn't get too worn out for hunting, but if she heard the four-wheeler start up, she'd start having a fit. Sandy would greet everyone that came to the house by nosing them in the butt. Haha. One time I carried Magnum from the driveway to the pen because some dog across the street was in heat and he wouldn't come for me to put him up. Another time a dog was in heat, he kept getting out of the pen and we couldn't figure out how. So after I put him up again, I watched him. The fart ran in a circle then dove between the fencing and the bottom fence post! How he figured that out... And Cajun was smart enough to stick pills in the side of her mouth so that even if you closed her mouth and blew on her nose, the pill wouldn't go down. She'd spit it out after Mom walked away.

And now we're left with Honker, who is one of the sweetest dogs ever. Well, he can be - when he's not too excited. Last night we let him in the house, which is definitely not unusual. Looking at him, I thought about all the dogs we've had. My dogs, anyway. Ha. The ones I can remember, the ones that really mattered. And I wondered if it was worth seeing them gone to have them for just a little while. I decided it was. Watching Sandy slowly pass away was so painful, but what a life she had. And how did she improve mine. It was watching a family member go, knowing they had to, knowing it was time and they would be happier. Knowing that you couldn't handle watching them struggle anymore.

Even being the "adult" that I am, I wondered if dogs went to Heaven. Ha. I don't think I believe that they do, but when I have kids, and we have dogs that have to die, I think I want to tell them they do.

How Common of Me

I totally read the wrong thing for the extra credit thing in Calculus II. Therefore, I wrote an essay on the wrong thing. Furthermore, that means I did not get the extra credit.

Oh, well.

Glory

For Calculus II, Lunsford offered us an opportunity for extra credit by reading and writing a short essay on "The Weight of Glory" by C. S. Lewis. I'm not sure why I even did it, because I believe at this point it may be irrelevant. However, I did it anyway, because it wasn't like I had too much to do.

"The Weight of Glory" is a sermon done by Lewis in Oxford about the true meaning of glory. I won't go through all of it (I'm strongly suggesting you read it for yourself), but the gist of it is human life is infinitely valuable. He says that we are sitting on the fence between unimaginable glory through being recognized by God and eternal damnation in which God forgets us.

God forgetting? Is that even possible?

Think about the weight of that. God recognizing us, alone, is incredible. You've heard from the Bible that when we come to the gates of Heaven we will either hear, "Well done, good and faithful servant," or "I never knew you. Depart from Me." How...scary is that? We are standing on the brink of both possibilities. How important is it, then, that we help each other along? Lewis suggests that we should worry more about helping others achieve their glory than struggling to find our own. We should take each other seriously in all that we do, recognizing the worth of each person, that each and every one of us is on the same fence - without exception. We must respect that in one another.

The people that are important to you, the people you can't live without: Do you not want to remember them? More than that, do you not want God to remember them? I don't believe we understand the overwhelming weight of what this means! Imagine yourself forever erased from everyone's memory, like you were never there. Ignored and left to pity your own fate. You would have memories of a life, but what does that mean? What are memories, ultimately, when you've no one to share them with? And to be rejected by the very God who created you, who had a plan for your life that you neglected, who unconditionally loved you when you did nothing but rebel against Him because of your own pride; what are you then? You're not even a faint glimmer of a memory. You are nothing.

But being acknowledged by God! How we long each day for someone to look at us and say, "You know what, I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you're alive." How incredibly uplifting that is! And how many times do we say it? We long to be recognized. We desire to be thought of as worth someone's time. It is so despairing to wonder if you are truly wanted, if anybody even sees you - really, truly sees you. If we so deeply care about what people think about us, how much more should we care about how God sees us. The epitome of rectification through acknowledgment lies in God. We do things for God's glory, but it is also adding to our own. That is not to say that some will have more glory than others; such is not the case. We are only truly glorified through God.

I feel as though I go from day to day seeking validation. I wait for someone to notice me, to want me around, to know who I am and to love me all the same. And I'm sure you do the same. Everyone waits for the words, "I'm glad you're here." It is then that we find life worth living. It is then that we long to turn our attention to others, because it is then that we feel we have something to offer.