Lots of things are ending right now.  The interns are back after a really tough summer for a lot of them.  I can relate to that, so I’ve spent some time listening and will continue to do so.  The summer of my internship was the most difficult summer of my life.  I know what it’s like to come back, but still want to be someplace else, to not recognize yourself after God’s broken and put together your heart, to be angry at this country for how much we have yet don’t realize, to freak out at SuperTarget because of the massive amount of choices.  Re-entry is rough.  So, it’s good to share my experiences from that summer and the years following.  And good to remember the ways that God changed me and moved me.  That summer was so vital to my development and to who I am.  Seven years later, I am still processing things from that summer. 

There are also a lot of people leaving our office.  Courtney, Elisabeth, Val, Angie, Cerena, and Ira are all moving out and on to other things.  It’s been pretty quiet in the office this summer and it won’t be the same without these great people. 

Finally, I will never again wear contacts.  I have my glasses on in preparation for my surgery on Friday.  Last night, I reached for the contact case to store them and then realized that I don’t need them again.  Ever.  Yeah, I’ll probably need reading glasses when I get older, but that’s it.  Glasses for 3 days and then perfect vision!  Yippee!  I’ve worn my contacts for 14 years and it’s strange to wear glasses again.  Very soon, I’ll not have to wear anything.  I can’t wait to wake up with perfect sight!  Praise God!

This is my first weekend where I have nothing on the calendar since May and the first totally free Saturday since March!  I am so excited to be home this weekend, to relax and rest.  Tonight I’m going to try a new restaurant with some friends.  It’s a Mongolian BBQ that just opened up in the area.  Should be a great time!  Tomorrow will be sleeping in, cleaning my house and doing some shopping.  I need to return some things and get a few things.  On Sunday, I get to go to church and Sunday school here.  It’s the first time I’ve been able to go in 6 weeks as I’ve been out of town the last 6 weekends.  I am very much looking forward to seeing them! 

Just one week till I have my LASIK surgery.  Yay for being able to see!  I hate stumbling around until I get my contacts in every morning.  Today I totally walked into the wall! 

Check out the progress at Emerald Hills!  We have a roof and a covered drive through entrance!  Here’s the link:  http://photoserver.zenfolio.com/p708692290/.  Enjoy!

Have a great weekend everyone! 

Whoa, that was a crazy week!  I was in Bergholz, OH at Elkorn Valley Christian Camp.  We had 125 4-6th graders and it was nuts!  We were only expecting 70 kids, so that was quite an increase and our 15 person faculty was stretched hard to do it all.  There was some farily large drama, but my drom girls were awesome.  They were the first girls in bed every night and even though they had some trouble understanding what quiet whispering during rest time meant, we had a great time.  Highlights of the week:  being handed a tooth that one of the girls had lost, not being the first one found during faculty hunt, recruiting a guy who will be a really awesome youth minister for Johnson (Come on Austin!), hanging out with an amazing faculty, escape runs to Dairy Queen when it was closed and we had to bring back donuts for the faculty, faculty night swim when it was freezing and I couldn’t hit the volleyball for anything, being thrown in the pool by Austin, Ryan and Jason on the last day and subsequently losing both of my contacts, and being asked if I would come back next year.  What a wonderful week.  I’m still catching up on sleep and have one more load of laundry to do tonight since I fell asleep as soon as I got home last night. 

I also got to see my best friend Heather and meet her boyfriend Adam, go to the Air Force museum in Dayton, OH with them, hang out with my parents and stop and see my cousins on the way home.  Needless to say, I was way happy to sleep in my own bed and have some “alone” time last night.  It was glorious. 

It was also wonderful to just see God working and be reminded of how much I love doing ministry.  Yes, I do ministry every day, but it’s not in as tangible of a way as last week was.  I love kids and I love working with them and helping them see God as their friend, not just as some big scary guy.  I thrive on ministry.  I live for ministry.  I need things like that.  And through it all, I came to some tough realizations of what life would have been like if Jake and I would have gotten married.  He would have hated last week.  Had I gone to camp and we were still trying to work things out, I would have come back and ended it.  Our lives and relationship with God move in totally different directions.  We never would have clicked on that front, which would have killed me in the long run.  So, thank you God for saving me from a horrible marriage.  I’m excited for what He’s going to do in the future with me and look forward to doing ministry with my husband whenever I do get married.  Maybe I should marry a youth minister.  Then I would get to do this all the time! 

Emerald Hills is awesome looking and I’m super pumped to go see it.  I now have my very own hard hat, so I can go up close to the site.  Yay!  Here’s the link to recent pictures:  http://photoserver.zenfolio.com/p438560015/.  We have a roof!!  WOOHOO!!

We have a work group from Milford, OH coming tomorrow.  It’ll be a group of seniors who really want to just see the property, but also are willing to pitch in and do some things for us.  It’ll be a lot of fun to be out there with them tomorrow. 

I have a wedding to coordinate this Saturday.  Debriefing for Pathways folk starts a week from today.  My LASIK surgery is next Friday.  Launch is the week after that and my grandpa has surgery on the 14th.  Then, I’m doing another wedding on the 16th.  Finally, I’ll have a weekend to myself the 23rd.  I think I might be painting my bedroom then, so I need to decide on colors and buy supplies.  And, my lamp is about to die and I didn’t buy the one that matches my table lamp when I was at Ikea, so I might be going up with Tina to do some shopping. 

And to my camp folks…”Here’s a shovel!!”  Ha! 

But I’ll be able to see clearly on August 8!!!  Went today for my LASIK full evaluation and surgery is scheduled for Friday August 8.  I could have gone this Friday, but I leave on Saturday to go to church camp in Ohio, and didn’t want to be out of state for my week post-op.  The operating room has a viewing room, so if you’d like to come down and watch them cut open my eye, you can!  Let’s have a little party at the clinic.   

So, the entire surgery will take 30 minutes.  It’ll take a few minutes to create the corneal flap, then I have to sit for 10-15 minutes and let it full separate.  Then, I go to another room for the actual refractive surgery part and that will take 3.5 minutes per eye.  Amazing.  It’ll be over so fast.  I’m a bit creeped out about the part that I’ll be awake and able to see, but they tell me that I’ll just be seeing a bright light…the laser.  So, hopefully it won’t be too bad.  It’s actually really cool how they do it.  I knew they used a laser to create the corneal flap, but I thought they sliced horizontally across the top of the eye.  But, they take a laser and shoot it vertically across the surface of the eye.  It goes down to a specified layer of the cornea and creates a tiny gas bubble.  It goes all over and makes these little bubbles, then the bubble become one giant space of gas in between two layers.  The sitting and waiting part allow the bubbles to get bigger and join together.  Then, they use a special tool to pull the top layers back.  A laser moves in the same way to reshape the cornea’s lower layers that are still attached.  Then, the flap goes back over, is irrigated and smoothed across and I’m done!  I go home and have to sleep/keep my eyes closed for 6 hours.  Oh, and I’ll have fun little shields that I have to tape over my eyes when I sleep so that I don’t accidentally rub them.  No rubbing my eyes for 6 months, I have to take special vitamins and put in drops for the next 6 months as well. 

I’m very much looking forward to all of this.  And, in the process I’ve found out that my prescription wasn’t strong enough for my eyes.  They’ve worsened to -5.75 in the left and -5.77 in the right.  They were -5.25 in the left and -5.5 in the right.  And, my eye pressure is rising a bit, too.  It’s up to 15 in the left and 16 in the right.  Still acceptable and normal, but that’s something I watch closely with my family history. 

Oh, and anyone who might be wanting this….my doctor does it free for 1 missionary a month.  He prefers it to be someone serving overseas, but I kind of snuck in there.  So, Erin and Tim and any of you other folk out there serving God overseas, just let me know if you want the contact info and I’ll pass it on to you. 

I just can’t sleep!  My body clock is all messed up.  I had a migraine yesterday and today and slept too much during the day.  It’s way annoying.  I just can’t sleep.  Argh.  This has been happening a good bit in the last month and it’s hard.  Julie calls it my jet lag.  And it really is.  I just didn’t get to go on a cool trip anywhere.  So, in my way late night boredom, I thought I would update ya’ll.

The NACC was last week and I have to say that it was probably the best NACC I’ve ever been to.  Kim H. and I shared a room at the Hilton and it was amazing.  The bathroom was small, but everything else totally made up for it.  Working the booth was rather tiresome for me this time.  Several people asked how the wedding went, so I had to explain.  Time after time, I am completely amazed at my support network.  I got even more offers of places to retreat.  I’m so blessed.  I’m trying to figure out when I can take advantage of some of these offers.  I’m headed to Denver in September, and will try to make it to Knoxville in October to enjoy the fall colors on campus.  Overall, I got to see some good friends and make contact with several church groups about coming to Emerald Hills to do a work day.  It was great. 

On Friday, I went to Ikea!  I love that store.  I want an Ikea house.  Seriously.  I love their kitchens.  If I ever get to remodel a house the way I want to, I’m totally having an Ikea kitchen complete with drawers instead of lower cabinets.  It’s my dream.  I did manage to only spend $30, which is a huge accomplishment for me. 

This last weekend, I headed to Scottsburg for the family gathering.  My aunt and uncle and cousins from IL came in and my parents and brother came down from Indy.  It was great fun.  They had kittens and I got to play with them.  I really wanted to bring one home, but I’m just gone too much.  If it was an older cat, it would be much more feasible because I could just have someone come over and feed and water it and change the litter box every few days.  But a kitten is much harder work.  I got some really great photos of them though, so I’ll be posting them soon.  It was also just really good to be surrounded by my family and not have to talk about anything.  They love me and accept me for who I am.  What a blessing to snuggle on the couch with Hannah, Bethany, Sara and Leah and watch a movie.  Just good downtime with family.  I needed it. 

Tonight I got a haircut and I love it.  It’s supa short…as in barely touches my shoulders.  She cut off like 6″.  But it’s great.  I needed a major change there and I’m really happy about it.  No more wedding hair for me!  I also had my first appointment with my therapist.  It’s the guy that Jake and I went to before we broke up (we actually ended things in his parking lot).  Just a really good session.  He affirmed a lot of what I had been thinking, encouraged me, gave some really good insights about myself that I had never even thought of but that totally make sense, and told me that I was being too hard on myself.  Excellent.  I’m looking forward to working with him these next few months.  My insurance covers 15 visits for “behavior management” a year and I’m taking advantage of it.

Okay, this is way long.  And I’m gonna play a computer game or two until I get tired enough to sleep.  Ciao! 

So, the trip to Indy was nice.  It was good to see my parents and other folks there.  Dad’s department had a pretty big picnic for the four guys retiring from there.  Lilly owns a really nice park on several lakes and it was at a shelter house right on the lake.  There was a great playground, 3 sand volleyball courts and the shelter was great.  Dad was rather popular, with the most number of people there for sure.  My grandparents came (Hi Grandma!), my brother got off work, my dad’s brother, sister-in-law and sister came, my mom’s cousin who also works at Lilly (just a different building) took his lunch with us, and the stars of the show were the kids that my parents have “adopted” and their mom Lori.  Nearly four years ago, my mom started helping out with a family who had just had triplets and had 2 older boys.  Now, there’s a 6th kid, the triplets turn 4 next week, and my parents are firmly “Grandma Brenda” and Grandpa Bobby”.  The kids had a blast at the playground and did a great job of not going near the water.  We did tell them there was a shark in the water, so that helped keep them away for the most part.  Although one of them did want to go see the shark, so we had to convince him of the dangers of sharks.  It was fun.  We only had 4 of the 6 kids as the two oldest were at Boy Scout camp with Daddy.  Still, it was a blast for them and entertaining for me.  I took a bunch of pictures, but don’t want to put them up here. 

My dad worked for Lilly for 39.5 years (not the 41 I thought…Sorry!).  Still, it’s incredibly impressive.  It was the first job he had after coming back from the Army.  He got drafted right out of high school, headed to Germany and missed going to Vietnam because of an infected thumb.  He still has problems with that thumb!  He came back, did some technical school, and started at Lilly January 1, 1969.  I wonder if there will be anyone from my generation who sticks with the same company for that long.  It seems that all of my peers change jobs and companies and states like it’s nothing.  I love Team Expansion and know that I’ll always support them, but I want to be a mom.  Chances are that I’ll be a stateside mom with a non-missional husband, which means that I’ll have to quit at Team Expansion.  But, who knows.  I might end up living in a hut in Africa yet!  I don’t see that God’s leading that way, but I am open to His leading, so who knows.   

And, I’m settling back into life as a single woman.  It’s not a fun transition and in many ways it feels like a divorce.  I am keeping the queen size bed that I had bought for Jake and I.  I never slept on it until he was out of the picture, but I love it too much to get rid of it.  So, my parents have my old bed as their guest bed since my brother moved out two months ago.  And I bought new bedding for my bed.  Last night was my first night to sleep with sheets and it was great.  I’d just been sleeping on top of the bare mattress, which wasn’t too bad, but still not that good.  I am going to totally repaint my room and change things.  I picked an icy aqua color (it was on clearance) and really like it.  I’m thinking I might do three walls with a silvery gray color and then the wall behind my bed have be a couple shades darker than the bedspread.  We’ll see.  It’ll be a fun project, though! 

Oh, and there were some people looking at the condo above me when I got home last night.  I had to talk to the realtor because they had parked in front of my garage and I needed to get there and unload my car.  I noticed he had an accent, but I can never tell the difference between Bosnian and Russian.  So, when I saw them as they were leaving, I asked and they’re Bosnian!  They were amazed that I had been to Bosnia.  They’re from the far northwestern part of the country, but it was still wonderful to meet them.  I do hope that she moves in.  It would be so great to have a Bosnian neighbor.  I’ve been praying for more ministry opportunities at home, and this would be perfect. 

Okay, time is short today.  Tomorrow we head to Cincy for the NACC.  If you’re going to be there, look me up! 

So, my appointment this morning was a bit chaotic.  I scheduled the consult on Monday and they said nothing about having my contacts out when I came.  Turns out that you have to remove contacts for 7 days before a consult because they reshape your cornea and throw things off.  So, I had the preliminary stuff today, but go back July 14 for the big huge workup and tests.  The doctor today did say that I seemed like a perfect candidate and that my corneal thickness was totally fine.  So, if things go well on the 14th, I’ll be scheduled into the next available surgery date.  He only does LASIK once a month, so it’ll just depend on when his next surgery day is and if I can come.  I’m super excited about this!  Please pray with me that things will work out and I’ll be able to have the surgery this summer.  I’d love to have it in July, but don’t know when he’ll be available. 

Oh, and one of the questions on my paperwork this morning was “How long have you worn contacts?”  I had to think back and do the math, but it’s been 14 years.  I got this in October of my freshman year of high school.  And, I’ve worn glasses since I was 7–20 years!  WHOA!  What a joy to have this taken care of and at no cost to me…thank you Jesus!

Anyone watch the new show “Wipeout” on ABC tonight?  It was hilarious!  A bunch of people looking like idiots while falling in the mud, bouncing off huge red balls, and going for a spin on the Dizzy Dummy.  Cracked me up non-stop.  If you need a good laugh, I highly recommend this! 

And, tomorrow is a momentous day for me.  I’m going for a consult for LASIK eye surgery.  I’ve wanted this for a long time, but have never been able to afford it.  Well, there’s a doctor here in Louisville who does it for free for missionaries.  The wife of one of the guys in our office works there and got me the hookup.  Another girl in our office had it done in May.  I’m super excited about this possibility!  I have no idea when my surgery will be, but I’m sure I will know after tomorrow.  I’ve been tested for this before and was a perfect candidate.  So, hopefully everything will go smoothly tomorrow.  Several years ago, I wore those contacts that you can sleep in and waking up with perfect vision was a miracle to me.  I loved it.  I’m thrilled that I’ll be able to do it again, every day of my life, and not have to worry about the contacts scratching my corneas (which is why I stopped wearing them). 

This has been a really hard week, not gonna lie.  I am so thankful for a God who loves me and cares for me in the midst of everything going on, for friends who call me and check up on me and drag me out of the house, and for the serenity and haven of my home.  I am so thankful that I have a home of my own.  It’s been wonderful to be surrounded by things I love and be able to lay on my couch and chill while listening to the birds.  Thanks to all of you who have been praying.  I’ve been feeling it for sure…it’s the only way I’ve gotten to here.  I’m still not sleeping very well, so please pray specifically for that. 

Got some big things going on the near future.  This Saturday, we have a group of 70+ coming to work at Emerald Hills.  It’ll be great to be there working and helping and doing great things.  Speaking of Emerald Hills, things are coming along super well.  The cement walls for the basement are up and it’s amazing to look at!  They’ve been working on contouring the ponds and run off edge of the Great Lawn and around the ponds and also on the septic system.  I took a family from Taiwan out for a tour today and had to drive a different way because of a new trench.  Everytime I’m there, it’s totally different looking and I love it. 

Next Thursday, my dad retires.  He’s worked for Eli Lilly for something like 41 years.  So, I’m headed to Indy for that.  Plus, I have a lot of presents that need to be returned, so I’ll be bringing those with me.  It’ll be good to see my family and spend time with them and with some other friends in the Indy area. 

Then, there’s the North American Christian Convention in Cincy July 1-4.  It’s always fun to go to those things and see old friends.  Immediately after that, my mom’s siblings (minus one) and families are gathering at my aunt’s house for a summer party.  We celebrate July 4th and my dad’s birthdya which is the 6th.  That’ll be a load of fun…I love my cousins!

My last planned travel thing for the summer is July 19-25.  I’ll be headed to Follansbee, WV to speak at a church on Sunday the 20th and then will be a camp missionary for a Junior camp week July 20-25.  It’ll be good to be working there and spending time with the kids.  Plus, I get to be a mom for the week!  What fun! 

Okay, so that’s my update for now.  Hope you guys are doing well. 

Why does it have to hurt?  Why do people say one thing without really thinking through their actions?  Why can people not commit or follow through with what they have committed?  Why can’t people be honest? 

God, please help!  My heart is shattered.  My finger is empty.  My brain hurts from trying to figure it out.  Give me Your peace.