1000 bucks later

Since my move to the south I have been very blessed with my living situation. As I've mentioned before I'm living with a couple of girl friends from high school. We stuck together through college and even into our post college lives we've made efforts to catch up and visit each other. Now we share the same roof and it has been a blessing. My roommate, Sasha, is an ER nurse and comes home with the craziest stories, often times too sad, but sometimes funny and sometimes scary. She's a good story teller, leaving out no detail. She loves listening to stories too and makes sure to get each detail.

The other day on a drive to the beach for a roommate date with Sasha my story of knee surgery came up and she sucked the details dry. As I rehashed the nitty gritty of my trampoline injury I noticed that life had turned out better than I had imagined even with a broken femur and a couple of torn ligaments. Sometimes we sense our lives are heading down a slippery slope to doomdom when, actually, it was the best thing that could have happened. That's how my knee injury happened.

Last year at this time I was in Salem, Oregon preparing for my first year of teaching full-time in the high school. I was scared, nervous, excited, and loving the future possibilities of adventures. I had no clue what I was about to get myself into. No clue that I'd be adventuring all over the west coast, experience a deep heart pain, tap into a hidden source of courage, call my mom everyday with tears streaming down my face, plan so many last minute lessons, spend countless hours grading papers at coffee shops, move to Southern California, sit in a desk to take classes, and fly across the world to pursue a passion of missions. I would have bet a thousand bucks I'd still be in Oregon, teaching, running, exploring, flying to visit friends and family. But here I am in a smoggy city, where there are way too many people who drive way too fast, writing a blog before emailing the founders RAWimpact in Cambodia to notify them of my trip in a couple weeks, drinking a cup of coffee across the table from a long time friend, Kati. None of this was what I wanted last year, but I'm glad that sometimes we get what we never wanted.