getting better...

Today is better than yesterday. Last night at around 10pm I realized that I could either stay up and cry or just go to bed and get some sleep. Either way, I'd wake up at the same time... one way I'd have puffy eyes, the other I'd be well rested. Sleep won. I'm usually not that rational when I'm upset. Maybe I'm growing up :)

Today has been filled with a human development paper... and I have to attack Augustine tonight. Both papers are over 10 pages, HD due at 9am tomorrow, Augustine due at 11:59 PM. Sounds like fun, right?

I actually really enjoy writing papers.. I know that's ridiculous. Something about getting to toss together all of your thoughts into a persuasive angle just makes me giddy. Nerdy, I know... but I'd much rather pull a day like today than study for exams.

HD is about the role of rejection in preschool group-entry techniques and the implications for clique interventions by school personnel. It didn't really start out that way, but the more I write, the more it heads in the clique direction. Who knows.

The other paper is about Augustine's perception of interractions between the Fall of mankind and chastity. I'm really super excited about writing it, which is helping me fly through this HD research paper. He constantly goes off on marriage and the celibacy and chastity and sex and... I don't know, he's so relevant. One of my articles is entitled "Sex in the City... of God." Snazzy. Augustine is always in style. Ha. Hopefully I'll be able to switch over to the second paper by dinner time. It's a stretch, but we'll see.

Really powerful City of God quote I read yesterday: (Book XIX, Chapter 8)

"...the more friends we have and the more dispersed they are in different places, the further and more widely extend our fears that some evil may befall them from among all the mass of evils of this present world. For not only are we troubled and anxious because they may be afflicted by famine, war, disease, or captivity, fearing that in slavery they may suffer evils beyond our powers of imagination; there is the much more bitter fear, that their friendship be changed into treachery, malice and baseness. And when such things do happen (and the more numerous our friends, the more often they happen) and the news is brought to our ears, who, except one who has this experience, can be aware of the burning sorrow that ravages our hearts? Certianly we would rather hear our friends were dead, although this also we could not hear without grief... we should prefer to hear, or even to witness, the death of those we love, than to become aware that they... have died in their very soul."

I know how that burning, ravaging sorrow feels... but it blows my mind that we're called to have that same sorrow for all people that we have for our friends when they change. We're called to have overflowing compassion for all of God's people.. not just the ones who contribute to our lives. What an insane vocation -- what an incredible mission. Love truly is painful, isn't it?