Ruminations of the week:

Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness, who seek the Lord: Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug.
Isaiah 51.1

Today in church someone spoke a word about people being hard-hearted, like stone, needing a hammer to chisel away the rock keeping them from true worship. I seconded their prayer, their cry, I remember the stone in which my heart was encased only a year ago (this week!). But later today I read this verse and the gratefulness only increased. Can it increase more?

I talked to someone the other day, and in the midst of her saying how much she missed me and how sure she was of the Lord's will for my life this summer, she said one thing that I've been so excited about since. She said that since I've been gone since winter break she's heard such determination in my voice, whether it is to be content here, to stick to a schedule, to get the Lord, whatever it is I'm doing, she hears that I'm doing it in earnest.

The Lord's been speaking to me about the past few seasons of my life and it's been a little frustrating for me to realize that this season is going to have to be a different season than the one in which I've grown so comfortable. This year has been a season of being. Enjoying the Lord, basking in His goodness, testifying of His grace. But He's been speaking to me that this year will be a year of doing. That means this year will have to be a year of hearing. I'm excited.

I realize I've said little about my roommates, either last semester or this:

Annie is my direct companion, we share a room and a bathroom, and a blowdryer. She is everything I'm not, which is fine, because I'm everything she's not and I've got that on her. She is tall and thin and staggeringly beautiful and musical and wild and witty and friendly and social and she likes cream of wheat. Last semester we became friends and this semester I feel the lack whenever she's not around.

Monique is the Californian surfer babe, mulatto and proud of it. She has crazy curly hair and a huge laugh and the kind of smile that can't help but make everyone around her smile. She likes to wrestle, much to the chagrin of our downstairs tennents. She likes her boyfriend. She likes to eat yucky chicken fingers. And she likes to pull me down on her lap once or twice a day.

Kristin is the vagabond firefly. Born in Jamaica and raised in the Philippines, she completes the flavor of our small home. Always ambiguous and consistantly constant, she does crazy things like dye her hair pink and practice Karate in our living room. She is my eclectic friend and we mesh when everyone else disagrees. She loves art and color and relationships and the Lord.

Together we make up our apartment--a collaboration of four girls, ages 19 to 25, all on different routes, all headed toward the same goal, and all at the same conjunction, happily together.

Now you know.
Aren't you glad?