Last night, I had the privilege of going to a Christmas party hosted by one of my lovely nursing professors and her equally lovely family.

It seemed as though a lot of people must have been going to Christmas parties last night, because the roads were crazy…as in, really crazy. I almost felt like I was driving in D.C., except in D.C., there would probably have been more Smart cars weaving maniacally in and out of traffic. So I was glad that I was in Lynchburg.

I was on the phone with my sweet little mother as I drove, which may not have been helping my already-directionally challenged self to navigate to this new and unknown location. I was armed with mapquest directions, however, so I felt somewhat confident in my ability to eventually find my way from point A to point B.

During a particularly intense point in the conversation with my mom, I had come to the point where apparently I needed to take a right on Cottontown road. I saw a sign up ahead that read “Cotton…” something, but a telephone pole was obscuring the second half of the word. I assumed, and took a right.

It was one of those roads that started out ok…and then there was a railroad track…and after that, the road got really bad rather quickly. I have never seen such large potholes. Neither has my car, apparently, for a few moments later, I felt the bottom of the car hit the top of the earth’s surface with a rather sickeningly-solid, grinding thud.

Yeah. That…wasn’t my road. It was Cottonwood road. Very crumby road. I would recommend you don’t take it unless you’re riding a fourwheeler, or a camel, or something.

I found the right road, found the right house, met some awesome people, had a lot of fun watching Elf with them, heard their stories from the seasons of yesteryear, enjoyed some really incredible culinary delicacies, and finally decided that I had better see myself off to home before the clock struck midnight.

My instructor’s adorable little eleven-year-old daughter, Katie, and her twelve-year-old son, Jessie (who is every inch a boy, and one of the most hilarious little dudes I have ever met) had been conversing with us off and on throughout the evening, and now as I stood at the bottom of the staircase buttoning my coat, Katie was standing on the stairs just above me, smiling almost wistfully.

“Thank you for coming,” she said in her sweet little girl voice, “I’m really glad you came. I enjoyed it.” And she meant it. And I was touched, and wanted to grab her up in a big hug…I remember what it was like when I was that age, but I doubt that I was half so charming as little Katie. (She, like her brother, is possessed of social graces far beyond her years).

I went with Katie into the kitchen to say goodbye to my gracious hosts and some of the other Liberty faculty members in attendance at the party. As we exchanged hugs and Christmas blessings, one of nursing faculty smilingly shared a couple words of encouragement that brought a smile to my own face, and a bigger one to my heart. (We forget that we can be generous with our words, but in fact, our praise and affirmation is perhaps the single biggest gift that we can give on a consistent basis).

Maybe my head was a little off as I left, or maybe I’m just still very much in need of practice with reading directions in reverse, but…I got lost on the way home. Like, really lost. As in, stop-for-directions lost. As in, had been driving somewhat aimlessly for thirty minutes lost.
It was almost eleven o’clock on a Friday night as I pulled up in front of one of the few houses on the street that had its lights on and still looked somewhat alive.

I cringed as I rang the doorbell, hoping that the person inside was not the frazzled mother of a colicky baby that I’d just wakened with the bell.

There were voices moving around somewhere upstairs…happy sounding voices full of life and energy, which was especially impressive given the lateness of the hour.

The person who eventually came to the door was a pudgy, cute-as-a-button little black girl who peered curiously out the window of the door without seeing me. She opened the door then, and leaned out, looking first to the right, and then to the left. As she turned to the left, she caught sight of me standing there for the first time.

I’m not sure what she expected, but I was apparently not it. She jumped six inches up and possibly as many more to each side, and her heart visibly leaped into her throat from its former perch inside of her chest. Her beautiful brown eyes got wide as saucers, and a shrieking gasp burst from her mouth as she clutched the door frame with both hands and stared for a wide-eyed moment.

I smiled what I hoped was a reassuring smile, explained my predicament, and asked if her mom or dad were around to give me some pointers as to how to get back into Lynchburg.

She smiled proudly then, tossing her little head with its proliferation of braids, all of which ended neatly in a series of brightly colored plastic beads.

“Oh, AH can tell you THAAT,” she drawled in a friendly little accent, “You just git raaght on this road here, and ya fallow all the cuurves, and you don’t tuuuurn, and then, yew’ll git to the CVS, and that’s Lynchburg.”

I assured her that she had been most helpful, and that I was grateful. And then I left thinking “I’ve been all the way to the end of this road. It ends in a cornfield…”

But I resolved to find the CVS of which she spoke, regardless of how many turns it took, and eventually, I found it—and I smiled, remembering how much I’d loved to give directions when I was a kid about the same age as my little friend with the braids…like her, I usually managed to leave out most of the necessary turns, but if you say something confidently enough with volume and conviction, it doesn’t really matter, because people believe you anyway.

There were several things for which I was very thankful as I drove home last night. I was thankful for my mom, whose words of wisdom have very much blessed my heart and straightened my thinking during this past semester. I was also thankful to be back on familiar territory, headed towards a known location—that was awesome.

I was thankful too, for children. For little boys. For little girls. For the fact that their young hearts are often so tender, that they’re so gifted as listeners, as empathizers—so much more than we often give them credit for. Inside of each one of them lives a man or a woman who will one day walk a path very different than what we can today imagine for them…but I was challenged last night to remember always to treat each little one as an individual, to converse with them in such a way that they know that they matter to me…

You never really know what children remember from the social interactions they have, but I know that when I was younger, before I hit my teen years, there were a couple of college kids who took it into their heads to take an interest in me as an individual…and it changed my life. And somehow, in some way, I wanna pass that on…not just to kids, because I guess we need to be relating to every individual in our lives as though they matter, as though we genuinely care…but I want to be especially aware of it when I’m relating to kids. Because they do matter…so much more than they know.

Sometimes, in the craziness of daily life, the confusion of the inner struggle becomes a dull roar, and the voice of reason and truth becomes very difficult to hear in the midst of the chaos. Today I had to ask myself why it is that, knowing all that we know, we still wrestle with and fight against the truth that God brings to our attention. Why is it often times so difficult to submit to and be changed by what we know to be right?

Perhaps because we so quickly forget that to refuse to submit to God's draw on our lives is infinitely more painful and significantly less profitable in the long run. Perhaps because I lose sight of who it is that I'm serving...or where it is that my focus must be consistently fixed.

Today, I am reminded again of how blessed I am to have mentors in my life who point out to me the areas in which I'm refusing to submit to the truth of what I know, the ways in which I'm not being consistent to the worldview I claim to espouse...

As I ponder tonight, I realize yet again that while truth is sometimes painful, it is also healing, purifying, and helpful.

Kinda like that grape-flavored cough/cold medicine that my parents used to give us when we had stuffy noses...tastes disgusting at the time, but helpful later on...yeah. Perspective. Very important thing in life. ;-)

There were two note-worthy experiences that occurred over Thanksgiving break which were memorable in…very different ways than the rest of the break.

The first occurred before I even got home. You see, I’m currently enrolled in an online philosophy course, and since it’s only an 8-week course, it doesn’t break for holidays. Thus, there were assignments due over the week of Thanksgiving, and so I decided that my time in the airport would be well-spent if I used it to read for my philosophy class (we read a book every week…more reading than I’ve done in quite some time for one class, but…enriching, doubtless).

So I was reading a fascinating book about the art of Metaphysics while I sat at my gate. I would glance at my watch every little while to see how close my plane was to departure. I remember at one point looking up and thinking, “Odd. Why are they not boarding? It’s definitely time for them to be boarding.” I decided—in a rather naïve display of lack of airport savvy—to go check one of the flight screens in the hall, to see if the gate had possibly been switched without them announcing it.

The gate hadn’t been switched. The screen read that my flight was “boarding.” Oh. Ok. By the time I got back to the gate, I could see the plane slowly backing away, headed towards the runway. Fail.

First time I’ve ever missed a flight because I was reading in the airport. I groaned inwardly as I rescheduled for a flight that left seven hours later, realizing that my five siblings would never pass up such a prime opportunity to tease their oldest sister about acting blonde. (They didn’t, either). But I was grateful that there WAS another flight going to Wisconsin that day—would have been a bit more of a bummer if missing the first flight would have meant spending the night in the airport.

The second incident occurred the morning after we got back (my poor father drove until nearly two in the morning to get us both home from Milwaukee that night in time for my sister’s bridal shower the next morning…he was SOOO wiped)

When we got home at almost two, several of my family members were still awake—plus my sister’s fiancé was over, and his younger brother had tagged along. Oh goodness. A party. I just love those!

I’d only managed to get about four hours of sleep the night before, however, and thus, despite my desire to enjoy the company of my long-lost family, I was shortly forced to go to bed by my circadian rhythms and my concerned mother.

I remembered to take out my contacts. I was rather proud of myself. Since approximately half the herd at the home place has or wears contacts, there are bottles of contact solution all over the place, and nobody’s terribly possessive of any of them, so you just grab the closest one when you happen to be in need of contact solution. Which is exactly what I did. I didn’t really look at the bottle that closely, because all of the bottles, historically, have been the same stuff…normal saline solution that you can use as eye drops or contact solution or spider drowner, as the case may be.

Well, unbeknownst to my not-quite-coherent self, this bottle was…different. I didn’t find that out until the next morning, when I put my left contact in and experienced an odd burning sensation unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in the past (or hope to experience in the future). That was possibly the fastest I’ve ever removed a contact.

I thought to myself that I must have somehow still had shampoo on my hands from showering, or something, so I washed my hands veeeery thoroughly, and splashed some water into the eye to try to stop the burning, and waited for the little fellow to calm down and chill out…which he eventually did.

Michelle came in to stand beside me at the bathroom sink right about then, and instantly noticed my dilemma. She explained to me that that particular bottle of solution was peroxide-based and acidic, and thus, contacts must be thoroughly rinsed in regular solution prior to insertion. Um, thanks. I appreciate that tidbit. You have no idea how much.

So the second time, being one of those individuals who attempts to learn from previous errors, I rinsed the contact in regular solution…and put it in.

Ok, so it didn’t burn as bad…but it still burned. Quite a bit. So that contact just went into the garbage, and I opened a new set.

The eye, however, was irritated and watering for the rest of the day. Michelle had a bridal shower that morning, as I stated, however, and I had been asked to MC, so there was really nothing for it, I thought, but to just suck it up and go and pretend the eye would recover if I ignored it long enough (I am told that this is classic nurse thinking, for those of you who may have been wondering).

It was a lovely shower, and we had a lot of fun eating, and singing, and crying, and laughing, and watching Michelle and Joel open gifts, and for me, it was an opportunity to meet people that I’d not seen in over two years, which was special.

By the end of the shower, it was early afternoon, and the eye had gotten progressively worse to the point where I could only squint out of it. It had been watering away like an Artesian dribbler all morning, and by one o’clock, it had swollen almost completely shut and wasn’t overly comfortable.

My Dad is a wonderful, merciful, compassionate man, and thus it was that when he came to the shower towards the end to help with clean up, or whatever (I confess I was a little out of it by this point), he decided that he and I should just go home.

I thought maybe if I took a nap, the eye would miraculously get better. So I took a nap. And when I woke up, the eye was swollen completely shut and I could hardly see anything out of the other one either. Fail.

And so we decided that perhaps, we should have someone medically trained take a look at it. The only thing open that night was the emergency room, so…we went to the ER.

I was holding a washcloth over one eye, and the woman behind the desk looked at me with concern. “What do you have in that eye?” she asked. The look on her face suggested to me that she was expecting to see a knife protruding from the globe of my eye when I removed the washcloth. I was oh-so-tempted to say something like “well, my little nephew and I were fighting with forks at the dinner table…” but sometimes, you realize that the situation is just not appropriate. So I told her it was a chemical burn, and Dad showed her the bottle of contact solution, which he had brought along for show-and-tell.

After a lovely visit with my dad in the waiting room, a man in beautiful blue scrubs ushered me to a sterile-looking back room and asked me to please sit in the funny looking chair in the middle. He was a third-year resident named Ken Ugalali, or something like that…I think perhaps he was Kenyan. Whatever he was, he was certainly quite amusing to me that night. He towered above me, topping off at about 6’6”. Looking down with his black face full of deep concern, he asked what I had gotten in my eye. I told him the story, and handed him the bottle of contact solution.

He turned it over and over in his huge hands, reading the list of active ingredients.

“Number one in comfort,” he read slowly, reading the label on the front. He looked towards me. “Well, not for YOU,” he noted matter-of-factly. I cracked up.

Another doctor burst through the door at that point. He needed supplies from our room, and, while apologizing for his intrusion, he headed towards the medicine cabinet on the back wall to get what he needed.

“Oh, it’s quite alright,” I said, “We welcome any and all visitors. Thank you so much for stopping in!” He looked a little bit confused, and then he kinda laughed, and said he’d never heard that before.

Ken Ugalali wanted to examine my eye, so he had me sit opposite one of those big ophthalmoscopic machines like you find at an eye examination place. He sat on the other side of it, and tried to figure out how to turn it on.

I confess, I was very much amused by the process. He flipped a few switches, and then smacked it with his hand.

“Aw,” he grumbled, “it never works for me. And then the other guys come in, and it turns right on!” He smacked it again with his palm, and then started fiddling nervously with a bunch of knobs whose function he clearly didn’t quite understand.

“Maybe if you flip that switch right there?” I offered. He flipped it, and a few others, and eventually a light went on.

“Good job!” I said. “It’s working.” He grinned proudly, and nodded, and if he’d been a fellow-nursing student, I would have high-fived him. This medicine stuff is so much more complicated than people realize, you see.

He needed to look at my eye, but the eye was swollen shut. This posed a problem, one which he was unsure of how to fix. He took a very long q-tip, and poked at my eyelid, trying to get it to stay open. Not so much working. (I really wanted to suggest to him that we just use a toothpick to prop it open, but I was afraid he might not understand that I was joking).

Finally, looking very uncomfortable, he decided to just use his thumb to hold the eye open. I was laughing really hard on the inside by this point.

After completing his examination, he went to get his senior doctor to verify his findings (I actually am not sure if he found anything…but he gets props for doing the examination in my book).

The senior doctor came breezing in and did the same examination all over again. The look on Ken’s face was precious when the senior doctor reached out without hesitation to hold the eye open with his thumb. That time I laughed out loud.

Eventually, they reached the conclusion that I had a chemical burn of the cornea, and after irrigating the eye with two liters of saline solution, they decided that I could go home.

I was completely soaked at that point, because the saline had all kind of run down the back of my neck rather than running out into the little tray that they put under my head. It was really cold that night, snowing outside, and I was wearing about five layers, so I decided to just take some of them off before I put on my coat.

The attending nurse was ok when I pulled off the hoodie and said I didn’t need to be wearing a soaked sweater. Then I decided I didn’t need to be wearing a soaked shirt, either, so I whipped it off.

His face registered shock. “How many layers do you have ON?” he asked. I just laughed, and said probably more than the average person, cuz I’m still not used to Wisconsin frigidity. He left shaking his head. He’ll recover. And so did I. So thankful for the fact that corneas mend themselves rather rapidly.

You know how sometimes the cleaning frenzy strikes people, and they find themselves unable to rest, chew gum, or do homework until everything within the line of sight is spotless and neatly arranged in symmetrical patterns? Yeah. I suffered an attack of I-must-cleanitis two days ago, for no particular reason that I could identify upon much reflection.

This is why my room is now spotless, and, secondarily, why I am unable to find half of the items I’m accustomed to using on a daily basis. Fail.

I met an adorable little dude in the library a few weeks ago. On that particular night, he was working feverishly on a massive research paper covering the historical development of certain doctrines within the church—apparently this brain exercise is part of the degree completion plan for a Master of Divinity program.

Now, there are lots of adorable little men and women who work feverishly in the library on a regular basis. This is hardly outside the realm of the normal and expected. What was particularly striking about this little fellow, however, was the fact that his dad was working with him, helping him to edit the paper, and as they worked, they were conversing together in low tones, sometimes even bantering back and forth. I was intrigued.

I was working on a paper myself that night, but when the little dude took a quick water fountain break, I took the opportunity to strike up a quick conversation with his dad. I’d assumed that his dad must be a pastor, if he was helping him with the paper, but not so much—Little Man’s dad smiled at my assumption, and informed me that he was, in fact, an engineer, qualified to edit papers simply by virtue of the fact that he had written and read so many of them himself. He told me also that his son was an undergrad student, that he was enrolled in a Master of Divinity program online through another university, and that this massive paper was due at midnight (it was about 10:30 at this point). I was impressed that Little Man would enroll fulltime at two different schools, but he returned from the fountain just then to resume frantic work upon his paper, so that was the end of the conversation.

I’d mostly forgotten about Little Man until I bumped into him (not quite literally) outside the elevator yesterday. He has a full head of intensely black hair, with large black eyes that are equally intense and appear to be always observing. He’s a rather quiet sort of fellow, and thus, when I nodded in his direction, smiled, and said, “Oh hi!” he simply gave me a puzzled look, and said nothing. Apparently he was quite positive that I couldn’t have been speaking to him, or else he was secretly wondering whether I was a lunatic (in which case, he may also have been wondering if he should run in the opposite direction very quickly while screaming for assistance).

He did neither, however, and so we stood in very awkward silence for a long second, and then I laughed, and explained to him where we’d met before, and asked about his paper, and how it had turned out. His face lit up with recognition then (much to my relief—it would have been excruciatingly awkward and irresistibly funny otherwise), and I realized that perhaps his silence was simply the result of a little mind trying desperately to remember where this tall strange person would know him from.

He politely introduced himself, began talking animatedly about the paper, and answered a few questions about his student status. He told me bits and pieces about what it was like to be a commuter student, and how, although his sister is older, he’s the one who has the car—he grinned a little when he said that, shrugged, and said that maybe it was luck (or perhaps a state of affairs decided by virtue of the fact that he possesses a Y chromosome, but I didn’t ask). And then we were at my classroom door, and so we parted ways of necessity, and he went off smiling to find whatever it was that he was looking for…

But as he strode away, the thing that stuck with me was his intensity. Perhaps part of it is just his being rather shy (although it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s a bit outgoing when he’s with his family) or the fact that he has piercing black eyes, but the youngster—I discovered that he goes by PJ—was one of the most focused little dudes that I’ve met for quite some time. His walk, his tone of voice, his facial expressions—everything conveyed a sense of urgency which spoke of an inner drive uncommon in today’s average college student (it may also have been caused by a mild case of indigestion, but I doubt it).

I found myself shaking my head, and wondering…wondering how he’d been parented, where he’d gone to middle school, what he wants to do with his life after Liberty, what his parents are like, and what the family dynamic might be…because from surface appearances, it would seem that his parents have done some things very, very right.