I'm sitting here like I usually do at the close of another school year, trying to figure out what exactly each moment in this place has added up to. A good experience, a bad one, neither? What have I really learned? Who have I become? Where am I going? All these questions and more are flooding my brain, and yet I don't have the answers to most of them. I'm too close to this place to really understand what it all means, and honestly, some things will always be a mystery no matter how hard I try to peel back the layers.
Its hard to try and figure out how these three years at SPU have changed me, and yet in one sense I see so many lessons learned, friendships built, dreams realized and others taken away. I've had moments of extreme sorrow and moments when JOY filled my heart against all odds. And in the background beauty has always been there. The beauty of people, hurts, deaths, peace, patience, and hope. The beauty of Christ healing my heart of so much pain, and seeing him dwell richly in others.
Honestly, I have a lot of friends who don't understand why I love spu when I was rejected twice from their nursing program, but each of those rejections was a needed circumstance, a good I didn't want, but wouldn't trade for the world. I have been shaped and fashioned by two things at SPU: relationships and rejections. I wouldn't give any of those experiences away, no matter how painful they were. I would not be who I am today or going where I am now if not for those people who have come alongside me, and for the circumstances that were beyond my control.
So as I sit here reflecting on the past three years, I feel more than prepared to go, to find a new place of growth and to live in the grace, peace, and joy that Christ so graciously provides.

metaphors

I see the world through lyrics and metaphors,
Similes and analogies swirling
Like so many dust motes
In the sunlight of my mind.
Some- like rare gems
I collect in a secret corner
Counting my treasures like
A miser pores over his gold.
Others I see in vivid pictures
Wishing to rip them from
The screen of my mind.
Somehow this aspect of being
Is worth more to me
Than the things themselves,
This means that has become
My end,
In a twisting of the natural order.
A blessing
That I see the world
Through this lens,
This vision of a million
Different eyes upon a single scene.

each second

Somehow the oxygen still seep
Its way into your shriveled cells,
Each haggard breath a year of your life
In seconds.
Your eyes are glassy, unknowning pupils
Tossed amidst the blue of your irises.
Each heart beat pounds like a race horse
Down its final lap,
Erratic, frantic pulsing, one hundred and eighty beats
In each second.
And my hands shake as they brush
Ones, paper-thin and immobile at your side.
And each second
Is like a decade as Time and Death
Fight their age-old struggle
In you.
Why must civilians feel the heat of bombs,
The bone –crushing force of victory
That in seconds
Changes the landscape of your body,
Conforms it to the shape of the earth
Beneath you?
But the warriors have no answers and
My brain skips wildly,
Each neuron-message an overwhelming effort
And in each second
A century roles by and
The drips of the IVs and the blinking lights
Attempt their own conclusions.