sup. hi. guten tag.

Hey all.

Or just hey to me? Probably.

Let's talk about a couple elements of my last post.

Or instead of "let's," maybe it'll be "let..." I still haven't decided whether or not I want to declare my blog to the whole of my family and friends yet. Probably will...still hesitant. That hesitancy is a whole other post in itself.

Anyways, I digress.

One major element I'm going to explain here is where "feisty" comes from.

The short of it:

Romans 12:11 - ¹¹Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord.

Thanks www.BibleGateway.com for the quick copy and paste.

The long of it:

This last year, like I mentioned before, was not the best one for me.

I had just started to truly get over a very rough first job out of college

(Suburban high school 10th grade English teacher...
I know),

started working at a restaurant in my old college town as a server

(read: fumbling at a job I'd never done before
all while seeing a lot of friends from
when I was "everything" I wanted to be in college after
I had my own personal trauma at said first job),

and having very few-to-no friends available to fellowship with

(although I did have my husband,
but any sane wife knows
that her husband can't be her everything.
He IS human.)*

After having to move from our old college town to husband's home town to live at some family property to save money (because almost none was coming in compared to what was going out; read: student debt), I came to a personal turning point in my young life.

I was

down,


down,


down.

Didn't want to look for work, but needed a job...bad.

Didn't really want to wake up, but I knew I needed to to see the sun that day.

That sort of
"down."

It was on a trip with my husband to my home state (which is thankfully connected to his home state) that I heard a short sermon on this Romans 12:11 verse on the radio.

Our stations we listen to were fading away, and the Christian station was the first one that came in clearly. Note that this trip was for an interview I had at a school for a mid-year opening, which was testing every single one of my nerves.

It was an epic fail, and I do mean epic, but maybe that will be important to describe at a later time. Right now it's not, because the most important (yet quite subtle) thing that happened to me on that trip was hearing this verse.

One thing I had lacked in my life over the last year was zeal.

It was lacking in every aspect of who I was, and that night I started to slowly turn the corner on this ride in life and began to choose to live again.

It was tough, and it still is, but I eventually realized that choosing to live and choosing to be full of zeal is as much in God's will as a phone call to do his Work in Mozambique (or other choice nation) would be.

So, I'm on that zealous path, and hopefully this blog will be one of the many reminders to stay on it for good and not fall off again. This time, this path is with God, and not on my own.

I was going to talk about what I meant by being a "lapsed" musician and "lapsed" athlete, but I think I'll do that next time.

It's been fun.

:)

*That will probably be the last time I put a period at the end of the final sentence inside parentheses, as I'm pretty darn sure it belongs outside of it. I just wanted to do that for style and fluidity.** ** Yes, yes, I'm an English teacher, but I've been a punctuation-and-grammar-fan since my AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) obsession back in the day. Yet I do like to play around with all things Language Arts - spelling, font, punctuation, sentence formation - and bend the rules a bit. Maybe you'll see a period inside a parentheses after all.