(no subject)
I sunburned my backside. I thought it might go down the day after, but it didn't. It hurts.
Last day at the beach. My friends went home and my sister is meeting with her friends to head to Destin for another week, so tonight it will be just my dad and me.
***********************************
I finished another book last night - John Eldridge's Wild at Heart. Occasionally he will say something that I think is off, but for the most part I thought it was a very thought-provoking read. The book also contains a lot of good quotes from other people. I came across this one embedded in the final chapter last night:
"Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive." (Gil Bailie)
The night before last I was lying in bed with my eyes closed, in the process of going to sleep, and I started thinking about a story I had read earlier in the other book I just finished - The Best American Sports Writing. This was about a man from Burundi who now lives in Austin, TX, where he works at a running store, coaches, and competes. The story was about how running saved his life - literally. He is a Tutsi and when he was a senior in high school, the newly-elected Hutu president was assassinated, sparking attacks similar to those that would follow months later in Rwanda. (Burundi did not experience genocide on the same scale as Rwanda because their army remained uncorrupted).
He went to high school one morning and the Hutus trapped all Tutsi students and teachers in a room - beating them on the back of the neck on the way in - doused them in gasoline, and set it afire. Nine hours later, after hiding under the bodies of his friends, he decided that he would rather let them kill him with machetes than burn to death. So he jumped out the window.
Miraculously, no one saw him until he was running off - flames on his back. They chased him, then decided that he would probably die from his injuries anyway. The one guy who got close fell in a ditch, and the man killed him.
These were the words that were in my head the other night - where he talked about how he killed the man and how he hated it. That he had watched Chuck Norris on TV and knew how to break a neck.
I thought of how horrible that must have been, how horrible some of the things that go on now are that we turn our heads to. I don't know the specifics of Darfur, but I know something similar is going on there now and that was what came to mind. I got this flash of "why am I not doing anything?"
They are a separate world and I am just a girl with no resources. But they are still just people and I am just a person as well. When you break things down to one person interacting with another, the world seems a whole lot smaller.
It's not just Darfur. There are people all over the world - even in my country, my state, my city, who are in terrible need. What can I do, where do I start?
That's why the quote struck a chord, as I spend my summer trying to think up some way to give my time for the month of July and pondering my future career choice. I tried to be very honest and asked myself, "What makes me come alive?"
The first thing that popped up was running, then W. But I'm looking for something vocationally-applicable here. Then I thought of something I've noticed for a while - what makes me come alive is responsibility.
When I took ballet, my teachers would always say the same thing when practicing glissades, where one literally "glides" one foot to the side, then the other follows it. They would reach out one beautifully elongated leg, then say, "reach faaaaatha" as they would stretch that leg as far as possible past the point where the toes would come down if the leg were simply dropped before gliding it to the floor. Thus making the distance covered by the legs longer than flesh and bones would dictate.
This is how I feel when I know that someone is trusting me to help them. Like I am pulled up to my fullest potential and then some. I feel this when a friend calls because she needs someone to listen. Even though I'm nowhere close to a doctor right now, I still have a lot of people ask me about something funny on their finger or a cut on their toe. The words, "Let me see," have almost a soothing quality to me because I know that I will be pulled up past whatever state I am in to be something someone else can lean on.
So I guess that's an applicable calling for a doctor - responsibility. There are, of course, many things that make me come alive, this just being one of them. At any rate, I thought it was a good point of guidance to think about, so I figured I would share.
And if you're still reading at this point, you deserve a cookie.
Last day at the beach. My friends went home and my sister is meeting with her friends to head to Destin for another week, so tonight it will be just my dad and me.
***********************************
I finished another book last night - John Eldridge's Wild at Heart. Occasionally he will say something that I think is off, but for the most part I thought it was a very thought-provoking read. The book also contains a lot of good quotes from other people. I came across this one embedded in the final chapter last night:
"Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive." (Gil Bailie)
The night before last I was lying in bed with my eyes closed, in the process of going to sleep, and I started thinking about a story I had read earlier in the other book I just finished - The Best American Sports Writing. This was about a man from Burundi who now lives in Austin, TX, where he works at a running store, coaches, and competes. The story was about how running saved his life - literally. He is a Tutsi and when he was a senior in high school, the newly-elected Hutu president was assassinated, sparking attacks similar to those that would follow months later in Rwanda. (Burundi did not experience genocide on the same scale as Rwanda because their army remained uncorrupted).
He went to high school one morning and the Hutus trapped all Tutsi students and teachers in a room - beating them on the back of the neck on the way in - doused them in gasoline, and set it afire. Nine hours later, after hiding under the bodies of his friends, he decided that he would rather let them kill him with machetes than burn to death. So he jumped out the window.
Miraculously, no one saw him until he was running off - flames on his back. They chased him, then decided that he would probably die from his injuries anyway. The one guy who got close fell in a ditch, and the man killed him.
These were the words that were in my head the other night - where he talked about how he killed the man and how he hated it. That he had watched Chuck Norris on TV and knew how to break a neck.
I thought of how horrible that must have been, how horrible some of the things that go on now are that we turn our heads to. I don't know the specifics of Darfur, but I know something similar is going on there now and that was what came to mind. I got this flash of "why am I not doing anything?"
They are a separate world and I am just a girl with no resources. But they are still just people and I am just a person as well. When you break things down to one person interacting with another, the world seems a whole lot smaller.
It's not just Darfur. There are people all over the world - even in my country, my state, my city, who are in terrible need. What can I do, where do I start?
That's why the quote struck a chord, as I spend my summer trying to think up some way to give my time for the month of July and pondering my future career choice. I tried to be very honest and asked myself, "What makes me come alive?"
The first thing that popped up was running, then W. But I'm looking for something vocationally-applicable here. Then I thought of something I've noticed for a while - what makes me come alive is responsibility.
When I took ballet, my teachers would always say the same thing when practicing glissades, where one literally "glides" one foot to the side, then the other follows it. They would reach out one beautifully elongated leg, then say, "reach faaaaatha" as they would stretch that leg as far as possible past the point where the toes would come down if the leg were simply dropped before gliding it to the floor. Thus making the distance covered by the legs longer than flesh and bones would dictate.
This is how I feel when I know that someone is trusting me to help them. Like I am pulled up to my fullest potential and then some. I feel this when a friend calls because she needs someone to listen. Even though I'm nowhere close to a doctor right now, I still have a lot of people ask me about something funny on their finger or a cut on their toe. The words, "Let me see," have almost a soothing quality to me because I know that I will be pulled up past whatever state I am in to be something someone else can lean on.
So I guess that's an applicable calling for a doctor - responsibility. There are, of course, many things that make me come alive, this just being one of them. At any rate, I thought it was a good point of guidance to think about, so I figured I would share.
And if you're still reading at this point, you deserve a cookie.