A Revelation and A Resolution

              The past year and a half has been one of the most exciting and beautiful of my life. In gas station parking lots, on pew kneelers in a catholic cathedral, and in a copse of trees awash in ashy failure, I’ve begun to discover just what it means to belong to another human, and to be entrusted with a human soul. My faith has been challenged more directly and more ambitiously than ever before, and has continually emerged from battle refreshed and renewed.

               Through the record-setting heat of last summer and into the heavy woolen winter, I worked two jobs, averaging more than 45 hours a week, and managed to take a full load of courses more intellectually ambitious than any previous semester of my collegiate career. In order to complete projects and study for exams, I was frequently obliged to burn the midnight oil until relentless daylight seared my irises, already dyed pink by contact lens irritation.

                And in January, I stumbled out of it with a 3.85 cumulative GPA, and onto a plane. From January to May, five of my best friends and I rampaged across the South American continent in an ancient station-wagon, taking life as it came.

                I came home, swept back into my arms a woman for whom the adjective ‘incomparable’ was personally crafted, slid a ring onto her finger and set a date.

               I say this not to toot my own horn. Goodness knows there are resoundingly more popular venues for torn-tootling than this blog.  I say it to give myself perspective: my life is awesome.

               I say this because through all of it, I have been consistently distracted.  I let the most miniscule uncertainty or tension in a friendship upend my world. I let my perfectionism become writer’s block, and my writer’s block become a monkey. The monkey, suffering no similar creative blockage, has purchased a saddle and become a relatively nimble horseman at my expense, since.

               I’ve known, throughout, that my life is awesome.

                But somehow, despite maintaining a mostly-proper outlook of the big things, I’ve allowed myself to lose the intense gratitude of the remarkably blessed.

               This evening, due in part to John Wayne, King of the Apes, and some minor unpleasantness that has arisen regarding my employment, I began to compose a sad, sad, song.

                No worries, I shan't be sharing.

                Anyway, the upshot was something along the lines of the endless endurance required to live, and the way in which we all get stretched out further than possible, until God—having unfairly extended our rubber-band souls to the point where the gritty grains begin to show—lets us snap back together. Fulfilling my role of Faithless Israelite 1, I was on the point of expressing doubt as to whether He was ever going to stop stretching.

                  And then it hit me like a musket-ball between the eyes. An archaic truth, unearthed in millennia past, and a personal mantra for me since roughly my twelfth year of existence: it’s all in your attitude. It’s all in perspective.

                   It’s odd to me that I’ve been so close to right this whole time, all the while allowing a pessimistic and thoroughly unindomitable frame of mind to overwhelm the sunniness in which my soul was made to bask. It leaves me more than a little embarrassed, let me tell you.

                  It also fills me with gratitude that a certain Someone was willing to extend the revelation while I was soggily sobbing in verse form.

                  And finally, it allows me to repeat my epiphany for your benefit, and for my own when the time to be reminded comes again: how good or bad your life is is not entirely in your control all the time, but most of the time, it is. And when the skies seem black, and cares attack, and you essay to count your blessings….Count ‘em, count ‘em, count ‘em. And put some soul into it.