Wannabe Cowgirl

I'm sitting here feeling kind of dumb. Really dumb, actually. I woke up early, thinking I was all on top of life, and went to the gym before heading over here to check my email and watch Sub-Finder for some teaching jobs. And...I got one! Except it was only for a half-day this afternoon, and it was a para job at a middle school. Everything about that makes me nervous -- the age group, the job description. So, seeing that I had been called a number of times whyile at the Y, I decided to cancel the middle school para job to see if anything better would pop up on Sub-Finder. I figured I could always re-snag the para position if nothing did. And no jobs popped up. None. Including that para job. Darn it.

So I continued to sit, refreshing Sub-Finder, waiting for another job. And I got called for one, a really good one! It was a half-day, again for this afternoon, in third grade. Much better, right? Excpet when I got the call, I decided to ignore the call and accept the job through the web version of Sub-Finder. Bad move. It wouldn't let me accept the job because it said it was being reviewed by another individual. Argh!

Fortunately, I picked up a couple of other jobs for the week, one of which will be high school English -- a scary prospect -- and a fourth grade job. So that will make 3.5 days of teaching this week. Not too bad. But still, I was so frustrated and angry with myself at the multiple screw-ups that prevented me from working today. I don't know why it bugged me so much. True, I need the work and the money. But I had, and still have, big plans for today. I hope to clean up my apartment a bit, attempt to plan a last-minute birthday extravaganza, finally talk to Anna (hey, I'm feeling optimistic!), take Cody out for a nice hike, and work on my resume and job applications for next year.

Then I got to thinking about a particular God-theme that seems to have come up in the last few days. I was reading Ezekiel last night, and was really struck by 40:1 -- "...the Lord took hold of me." And also Psalm 91:2, where it says, "He alone is my refuge, my place of safety; He is my God and I trust Him." So what's up with my frustration and mild panic this morning? If I trust God, won't He take care of me? Am I letting Him take hold of my life, of my heart? I don't know. But I want Him to, or maybe I want to get my own head out of the way so He can take hold of everything -- my life, my heart, and my rather stupidly errant brain. It would be nice if I could program myself to live a God-centered life, but then I would be a robot and that would defeat the whole point. So I guess I'll just have to trust Him -- minute to minute, day to day.

I just spent the last twenty minutes writing a lengthy, verbose, and decidedly non-witty blog post about the goings-on of my life these days. And then, just as I was about to publish it, IE closed and all was lost! Maybe I shouldn't spend so much time on this silly sort of thing. Anyway, as I thought about what I could say as a short summary of my lost words, it came to me that I was taking up a lot of space to say something quite simple, but certainly not small -- God is good. Always, in everything. And He's got good in store for me, and for everyone. He's blessed me so vastly and I am so thankful. God rocks.

Another year. 2007? I can hardly believe it, and yet it wasn't hard to write the date for the first time this year earlier. Strange, since every new month in 2006 came with a struggle to write the proper year, let alone month. And now, when I feel as if last year has barely begun, I'm writing my first post of the new year. And (let me warn you now, although you have probably already spotted this) it will be random. It will be rambling. And it most likely will use a lot of words to say not much at all.

Quite frankly, I'm relieved that the holidays are now officially over. This is the first year that I've found myself working retail during the Christmas season, and it was rather horrifying. The rampant materialism and the resulting emptiness that seemed so omnipresent to me just took my heart out of the holiday. But as dismal as that may seem, I still had a good time with my wonderful, wonderful friends. Ed's Christmas par-tay was excellent, especially Maria's pretzel cookies. Yum. And Christmas weekend spent largely with the Best Guy Ever was lovely.

So what's in store for the new year? God knows, and I'm good with that. But I'm excited to step forward into His plans. They're always the best.