benchmarks

Well, I've made it to Thursday. What do I have to show for myself? Not nearly as many hours as I had optimistically hoped for, but I'm meeting my content goals. I've already finished the chapters of the middle section that have been holding me back for so long. Now I can move forward to the really fun and complicated stuff at the end. That's going to be even more difficult to write, but I look forward to the challenge. And one big reason that the total hours doesn't measure up is that my class was meeting this week. Going to class and doing the reading effectively eliminated two otherwise prefect writing hours each day. Oh well. After tomorrow I'll be done with that.

Whenever I'm not writing I seem to get sucked into outings. On Tuesday night a bunch of us went hot tubbing at Ian's house, and last night I found myself at the Fryn' Pan at midnight. Apparently Perkins is only open 24 hours on the weekend, which was disappointing to learn. Oh well. At any rate, that meant that today I had breakfast right before going to my 12:00 class, and now I'm completely off-kilter. Whee!

Class has been very interesting. Some of what we've talked about has ben affirmation of things I already do and just don't do often enough. I like to be completely alone, without even music playing when I get serious about prayer. Since words are so important to me, I find it's easier to concentrate on God if I write out my prayer to him in a journal entry. It helps me put my ideas in order, and then in perspective. But looking back through that journal, it's easy for me to see that I don't do it often enough. usually it will be when I'm feeling very strongly about something, good or bad, and just need to talk through it, and that doesn't happen on a regular basis. I guess what I've taken from this class is that prayer--real solid prayer, as in listening to God without distractions--is far too important to only enter into once in a while. Of course it isn't realistic for us all to become desert hermits (that wouldn't be helpful anyway), but taking a few more minutes every day to approach God in reverent silence would make such a difference. That being said, the trip we'll be taking in May will make us all hermits for a little while, so we'll see how that changes things.

-Kim