when the going gets tough

its 430am and i cant sleep.  i got in bed at midnight and just laid there for 4 hours with frosty the snowman stuck in my head.  oh well. i have to get up in an hour anyway.  around 2am i had a nightmare while i was wide awake. that was weird and scary.  this happened shortly after i was doing some listening prayer because i was bored. its funny because a lot of times i dont understand what things mean until months later.  i think this is one of those cases.  pray hard.

there seems to be certain topics coming up these days, and im trying to see how it all connects.  i was having coffee with a friend the other day and we talked about a lot of things, family, church, relationships, the future. one thing that came up was anxiety.  when i was in college i had anxiety, which manifested itself in the form of breathing problems. it took me about a year to work through this, and if you want to know more im open to share, but for a while, i channeled my anxiety through exercise, and this turned into exercise addiction.  this year was a breakthrough though, because when i was training for the sd marathon, it was the first time in 3 years where i felt a release from that addiction and a freedom to know that my identity wasnt found in how many hours i spent in the gym or how many miles i could run.  this of course happened through progressive knee pain and really hit me when, minutes before the start of a half marathon race, i realized there was no way i was going to run 13 miles, when i could barely walk to my car.  but i wonder if addictive tendencies just move from one thing to another, and so subtly that we dont even realize it.  thats something i really need to be alert and aware of.  in fact, this only came to my mind through a random conversation with another friend about coffee addiction.  i mean, when i was in korea, i was slighty addicted to coffee…just call me seven cup shmoopios…but actually i only think it was because when i was in korea i was also somewhere between slighty to severly depressed.  ive never been depressed before, but im pretty sure that without my guitar, gchat, and God almighty, i might have become a raging alcoholic. and a raging loony toon. all in all im glad im back home. pray harder.

honesty.  today i was hanging out with another friend and we were talking about how its so hard to be honest in the things that really hit home…even to people who wont even see our faces.  on the application for summer project and for internships, there are a lot of hard questions that are asked.  questions that we dont like to talk about, like drinking, drugs, purity, eating disorders, lifestyle.  i shared with my friend that i lied on both of my applications.  i mean, ive since confessed this to a few upper ups, who were very very gracious.  but i wonder, why, in those moments, i made a choice to pretend to be something i wasnt.  i believed the lies that i needed to cover up shame, instead of falling in repentence and accepting forgiveness.  pray pray pray.

oh!  it is now 540am and time to go snow shoeing! wahoo!