PIctures Worth a Thousand Words

Two weeks into my Alaska experience, I still think I'm dreaming every time I go exploring. I paddled through ocean waters that literally sparkled so tangebly in the sun today that I felt if I reached down into the freezing waters I would be able to pull back a handful of diamonds...


...This after hiking through a forest of dancing wildflowers and breathtaking mountain views last night....

What words could even begin to possibly describe this scene?!

The beauty is just too impossible for cameras. My camera could never capture the feeling that is present in standing humbly in so many places that are so perfectly beautiful that I feel unworthy to stand as an imposter in their scenes. My camera doesn't capture the bald eagles majestically circling above us or the sounds of the ocean waves capping around us as we paddle down the glistening water between moutain and glacier cliffs that I sheepishly imagine I can actually photograph. I've been standing in these scenes with complete childlike wonder. so humbled and so in love. And so in awe of our Heavenly Father's creations and of his love for us. I have so, so very much to say, but words fail me. So I'm going to let pictures tell you only pieces of a remarkable story....



Top Left: A real live glacier as seen from a tiny tour boat. Top right: The place that made me believe that those crazy gorgeous puzzle box top photos are actually real places. Top middle: Paddling while operating the foot pedals for direction in steering turned out to be quite the challenging task... I'm not exactly ntaturally gifted in the area of being super coordinated... :)

Top: Doll Sheep. Traffic actually backed up on the highway for crazy tourists to snap pictures of them. I did the unclassy thing and rolled down my window as my friend kept driving slowly by...

Below: God just saying hello....

 

 

 

As if the beauty itself weren't enough to make my mind spin with awe, I met an entire bus of Nebraska people - 53 of them!! My California pharmacy student friend absolutely thought I was crazy for my ridiculous excitment over this fact, but how fun?! These people liked my enthusiam so much that they agreed to take a picture with me. Nebraskans = kindred spirits. :)

As promised, a photo of my little black bear friend from last weekend. Look how class he looks - nose up and everything!

 

Be Still And Know

I woke up at 4 am this morning for my big travel day to Alaska. I still haven't really processed the excitment of this day and of the next 5 weeks to come, but I now have three hours in the Seattle airport and another four hour flight to Anchorage to do so. I wish to speak for a minute on travel days. Brace yourself to find out about my secret nerdy nature (that is if you havne't already come to that realization...).

I have a love/hate relationship with airports and planes and long roadtrips and vehicles. I love trips to my destination but have little enthusiasm ever for the travel part of going home. I love them mostly becasue of the escape. I have thus far spent 10 hours in travel mode today, all the while being locked inside planes and airports. And I haven't been bored once. I get so excited on these days to read and write and think. When literally trapped inside places and modes of transportation, there is nowhere to go other than your final destination and the only way to get there is to sit confined in your seat and wait for time to pass. And what better use of time than to read?! I walked into the Omaha airport this morning with five books plus my scriptures in my carry-on luggage. I must sadly report that I am now in Seattle with only four of those books. The other remains on a random American Airlines plane and was last seen in Dallas. Some flight attendant or lucky passenger is going to find that poor book complete with my margin notes and flagged pages. Shoot, they'll probably feel my love for it all the way from Alaska! I at least hope they have the urgency to finish it for me...

So, having lost one of my treasures as a casualty of this trip, I pulled out a second. I started reading from Jeffrey R. Holland's book, For Times of Trouble. It's a book of his interpretations and thoughts on the scriptural psalms. And I lost myself in it! And I'm going to relate it to this whole traveling business becasue of course I came across the most glorious and perfectly fitting thing!

Behold:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16161187-for-times-of-trouble

Be still, and know that I am God, Psalm 46:10

Wait on the Lord; be of good courage, and he shall strenghten thine heart. Psalm 27:14

Stand in awe, and sin not: commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still. Psalm 4:4

This is why I love today. I am guilty of so often falling victim to the business of life. Even when I have a few moments to sit down and eat or when there are moments at work without patients to wait on or when I'm at home with no place more I need to be for the day - sometimes even when reading my scriptures or saying my morning prayers - I'm not still. I'm thinking about all that I need to accomplish. All the people who are counting on me and all the places I need to be. I am planning out my next moments or hours in my head while not finding time to appreciate the one I'm living in. I'm wasting my time worrying about not haivng enough time.

But, let's be real, when on an airplane, there's really nowhere to go. (Same thing with roadtips - I need to put in the disclaimer here that I love roadtrips when I have company so that I can curl up in the backseat for segments of the trip not responsible for driving). My phone is off so I'm not responsible for missed calls or messages. I don't have to pay attention to traffic signs. I can't decide I need to go for a run.  I can only be still. And there's such a peace in that. It's so calming and renewing and wonderful. I can read for as long as I want and journal and think uniterrupted. And for these brief moments in life, I feel like I'm truly gifted with time in a full sense. I'm not the pilot and I don't want to be. I'm trusting a complete stranger who I've never met or even seen and I'm perfectly ok with that.
I know he's bringing me where I need to go and so I wait on him. And it's so, so wonderful!

If only I could remember to take that same stillness and trust with me when I step off of the plane. If only I could trust Heavenly Father as the pilot of every moment of my life with that same trust in Him to bring me exactly where I need to go - even when we walk through bouts of turbulence and pass terrain that's foreign to me. If only I could forever be still and know.... :)

 

 

...all things are become new...

I have exactly five days remaining of my first pharmacy rotation, and then I board a plane on Saturday morning, and after a plethera of layovers, land in Anchorage, Alaska, where I will start my second of eight rotations. Pretty extreme travels just to work and learn in a pharmacy type setting, but extreme travels mean extreme learning and extreme excitement and I am bursting with nervous and excited anticipation!

Before I begin that journey though, I have to say goodbye to a few things in Omaha - to my hospital rounding team of doctors and medical students, to new friends here in Omaha I haven't even had a chance to really get to know and to old ones who will be gone on their own adventures when I return, and to my time as a big sister in the Big Brothers Big Sisters (BBBS) program here in Omaha. All of these people have taught me in big and small ways, but I want to write specifically for a minute about Brianna, my little sister with BBBS.

We had our last official date night on Friday. We went to TGI Friday's for dinner and then to the movie Despicable Me 2 - both Brianna's choices. And then I brought her home and had to say goodbye. And it was difficult, much more so than I had anticipated. And it made me realize all of the things that this beautiful little girl taught me.

Briana and I on our last date.

 It was so easy to get caught up in the stress and demands of pharmacy school. I struggled with finding balance and got upset on more than one occasion that I didn't have time to spend with all of the people I cared about. But, what my older friends could forgive me for in matters of scheduling, I realized an 11-year-old wouldn't understand and shouldn't have to understand. Brianna kept me grounded. I had to make time for her because otherwise I knew I failed her, and she had never done anything to deserve that. I was always amazed that no matter how short a time I was able to make for her she was happy to see me and excited to do anything at all. I was humbled that the number one thing on her wish list of time with her "big sister" was to have a sleepover. I was in awe of her ability to love and trust me despite the many times I felt I let her down in matters of time and energy I was able to give to her. She never demanded much of me at all, but her innocence and willingness to love taught me more important lessons than I ever learned in my hours of library studying.

Gingerbread houses on our sleepover night

It was a sacrifice to make time for Brianna, but I am so grateful I did. I was reading my scriptures this morning before church and lost in my emotions of goodbyes and new beginnings, and I came across 2 Cor 5:17:

"Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new."

And it made me realize that becoming new is a process. A lifelong process of learning and goodbyes, each time we leave taking lessons with us as we go that make us newer. And I thought of Brianna and how the lessons she has taught me have been so humbling and how in humility, void of our natural defenses, we are able to learn so much. And it all made the scripture in Mosiah 3:19 come to life for me in newness. How if we are truly "in Christ," we are innocent and perfectly loving like children. How we must strive daily - through as many goodbyes and new beginnings as it takes - to constantly become those new creatures. I am grateful for my time with Brianna to remind me of the beauty of such love!

"For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fallof Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometha as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father."  Mosiah 3:19

 

Funding College Education

Today being my first evening off from work in quite some time, I had a lot of plans to accomplish a lot of really great things. And for about two hours, things were proceeding forth wonderfully. I was even so efficient as to make cookie dough batter and cook chicken at 11 pm last night to enable fast baking and cooking today. In fact I made three dozen cookies (with sprinkles!) to deliver to friends and a very creamy spaghetti chicken crockpot casserole deal all within 40 minutes this afternoon after my day at the hospital and before my night at the temple. Pretty talented, right?

But interestingly enough, I felt in something of a fog all day today. I was exhausted at the hospital while there for my rotation and having to read through my patient information multiple times to make anything stick in my head. And such was my state at the temple as well. And funny things kept happening. To the extent that I actually sat there before leaving thinking about what lesson Heavenly Father was trying to teach me. Becasue despite the fact that things didn't run perfectly, I couldn't bring myself to use the word "mistake." I kept thinking that I was supposed to grasp something of a lesson in diligence - in proceedng forth with a smile and accepting helping from those around you despite errors or failures or mistakes you may make. I was watching people around me struggle with different things - things as simple as putting on a shoe - and stuggling with things myself and admiring how neighbors helped them and me without hesitation and how in the end everything was beautifully complete - like we were all cracked in different places but helping each other glue ourselves back together.

And then I left and drove home and a string of bad luck and disappointments came my way in a matter of a few minutes of phone calls and a few reckless drivers. Sparing the details, I was quitely wanting to call it a day and reflect on this whole lesson in imperfection some other day. I was in my house long enough to drop my keys and burn my tongue on a sample of my spaghetti concoction when I heard a knock on my front door. Wondering who in the world it could possibly be, I ran down the stairs to answer it. No one was there. Weirded out by that and not willing to accept that I had gone crazy and imagined the knock, I awkwardly questioned "Hello?" to the empty yard.

A scrawny little boy with a missing front tooth and messy hair popped around the corner, called me "Ma'am," and rattled off something about a free newspaper and supporting his attempts to pay for his college education and something else about $70 and any help he could get. He had a lisp and was talking a mile a minute and backing away as he did so, already anticipating rejection.

I smiled at him and asked him where he wanted to go to college. This boy was probably 8 years old and told me where he lived - not a good part of the city. I apologized and told him I wished I could help him but that I'm moving so I wouldn't be able to get a newspaper because no one would even be living at the house. But, clearly inspired by my willingness to even talk to him, he wasn't going to let me off that easy. He offered me a one month subscription. I told him I was moving in two weeks. So, in his last desperate plea, he offered me something that cost $9 and ended with a pleading, "Please, Ma'am, anything helps."

So of course, I told him to come inside and I gave him my credit card information for his form and bought something that costs $9. I don't even know what it was. A Sunday paper? The option wasn't even officially listed on his form. But he was ectastic. He bounced away. He talked my ear off while I filled out his form about how people have shut the door in his face and how he really needs to pay for college.

Moral of the story? We all have disappointing days. Some days no one will answer the door. People will slam the door in our faces. Our plans won't work out. We'll make mistakes. But people will be there to help us. Heavenly Father will help us. He will place people in our lives to brighten our days. To buy our newspapers or help us put our shoes on. And if it so be that we remain in a fog, unable to clear the haze and make sense of the disappointment to find direction, he might send a messenager directly to us. Nine dollars will never fund that precious child's college education, but it hopefully was enough to support his morale for the night and it was a small price to pay for the priceless lesson.

....And if it so be that this child was a scam? Well...then perhaps he'll attempt to for real fund a college education with my credit card number. And, if nothing else, he proved that I have a bleeding heart and I'm doomed to be one of those old ladies on the block that all parents send their children to for fundraisers because they know I'll crumble in the presence of their cuteness... :)