i'm not dead...yet

NEWSFLASH...I'm not in a ditch somewhere freezing to death. I'm still alive. I know many of you gauge my existence by the sheer quantity (and perhaps the quality) of my blog postings. So it's natural for you to think I have expired since I haven't posted anything in over a month. Whew. You can rest assured. I'm still alive. Barely. Last night they predicted a 5-year low of -50 degrees (not considering windchill). For those of you who live in 75-degree weather and are scratching your head at "windchill" it basically is a reference for what the temperature "feels like." Essentially I'm living in Antarctica today. To make matters worse, SCHOOL WASN'T CANCELED. What is wrong with our school district? Dammit, I really wanted to stay home today!

So what else is new with us? Ella lost another tooth on the bottom. We need to have a cash pool for these occasions. Because we didn't have 2 dimes to rub together (and we weren't about to make a trip to the ATM in subzero weather at 9pm), Skip wrote Ella an I.O.U. from the tooth fairy. Seeing that she can't read super well, you can imagine the disappointment and tears that erupted the next morning. She sat in her room for 15 minutes staring at the note which said that she could have an ice cream cone (perfect in this weather) any night this week. I had to help her see that our kind (the personality that she and I share) has a very hard time when things don't go as expected and that she had to see that ice cream is not a bad thing. It's just different than we expected. Life is hard for our breed, I tell ya.

My big entrance exam for pharmacy school is a week from this Saturday. I am officially freaking out. Please pray for me!

So a very interesting thing happened last week. I have been meeting with a woman that I have known for 8-9 years (she was a teen in a former youth group). She needs a lot of love and so I've been trying to pour it on thick. Well about a month and a half ago she informed me that she might be pregnant. Not a good thing. So we did a prego test and it failed. Not "negative" but the test didn't work. She wouldn't do another one. So fast forward to last week. She tells me that she did a test at home and it was positive. The father didn't want anything to do with her now and she needed to get an abortion. Something sparked in me. I'm not a supporter of abortion in any situation so I determined to be the champion for this unborn child. I cried. I prayed. I spent as much time with this woman as I could to encourage her to make an educated decision about the life of this baby. Yes, I would respect her decision if she chose to have an abortion. But I wouldn't go down without a fight for its life. It all came to a head last Friday. In the wee hours of the morning Skip was praying. And he shared something with me that he felt like God wanted me to hear. He told me to guard my heart in the event that this gal wasn't being truthful and she wasn't actually pregnant. Needless to say, I wasn't happy to hear this. But it resonated with me as it wasn't the first time anyone had said that. So I spent the rest of the day preparing myself. I took a half day off work and made an appointment at the local crisis pregnancy center. I asked my friend to come with me. She refused to come with me. Long story short, I had her do 2 more pregnancy tests (the first one "failed" again). The second one was negative. Did she lie to me? I really don't know for sure. But because I was prepared, I really didn't get angry. I'm thrilled she's not pregnant.

So what does all this mean? Late last year I asked God to give me a verse for this new year. He gave me Micah 6:8: "He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." He gave me the perfect life experience to implement that verse into my life. He sparked an advocacy in me, a fight for justice and what's right, that I never knew was there. It's really cool. This gal doesn't deserve mercy. I even had people telling me that I enabled her to lie to me and that I need to cast her from my life because she's too needy and disrupted the flow of my life. Jesus never did that. His life was the needy people. Those were the items on his agenda, not the distractions that were preventing him from getting things done. Jesus, even knowing that be would be betrayed by one of his closest friends, didn't cast him away. He loved him to the end. Was that enabling? Nope. It was mercy. That's who I want to be like.

One final note. I got the Wii Fit for Christmas. It's flippin' awesome! I expected it to help me exercise. What I didn't expect was it to give me marriage advice. Yesterday morning I got up a little early to spend some time on it. It says to me, "Good morning, Carolyn. You're up early." A little creepy, yes. Then it says, "So, have you noticed Skip's posture lately?" It gave me several options for my response. I figured I'd answer honestly so I chose "No." (Who notices posture?) Then it says to me, "Well, maybe you aren't spending enough time with Skip." Uh, excuse me? Considering how much I've seen Skip these last few weeks, I think it's probably right.

Wish me luck this morning as I venture out into the bitter, frigid, frozen tundra I call home. (Jen, a vacation in Cali is sounding mighty attractive right now!!!)