potpourri

I haven't done a personal entry for awhile, so I guess it's about time..... Life for me has been really busy lately. Work is going well at the high school--and I only have just over a week left till summer holidays. I've decided to go back to the same job in the fall. I'm looking forward to having some continuity (yay! a job that I've had for more than a year!) and building on what I've started this year.

In the meantime, for the summer, I'm teaching English at the same school here in Winnipeg where I taught last year. I'm super excited about that!!! It'll be a lot of work, doing prep work for 5 hours of teaching a day, but I need the practice and development. And I love working with international students!

Then......I'm going to visit Ecuador!!!!!!!! That'll be for three weeks, from the end of August to mid September. VERY excited about that! (bought my plane ticket yesterday!)

So, a lot of my plans (short-term, anyways) are falling into place even though it didn't look like they would at first.

Other than that, these past couple of months have been a little hard personally. You know what it's like when you discover (or rediscover) things about yourself that you really don't like....and I have the tendency to be hard on myself, so, instead of coming to God and asking Him to change me, I just beat myself up. Ok, Sharon, who's the judge? You or God? It's amazing how pride disguises itself!

Here's a quote I found in a book (that my friend, Christi Flagg, wrote the manuscript for!) which really spoke to me:

"O Lord! All our trouble comes to us from not having our eyes fixed upon You. If we only looked at the path that we are walking, we should soon arrive; but we stumble and fall a thousand times and stray from the way because we do not fix our eyes on You." -Teresa of Avila

"Fix your eyes on Jesus"--that's something that I kept hearing EVERYWHERE and clung to when I was deciding to come back to Ecuador the second time and I felt like Peter, stepping out of the boat. But when it's not a "big" thing--when it's just a "little" thing, it's easy to forget to look up.

I heard a story a long time ago about a shepherd who had an ewe that kept wandering off. Well, she gave birth to a lamb and, since the lamb would follow its mother, it also began wandering away, into possible danger. Well, in order to protect the lamb, the shepherd took it and broke its legs. Of course the lamb could not understand why the shepherd would do this to him--why the shepherd would cause him so much pain. But, while the lamb's legs were healing, the shepherd carried the lamb because he obviously couldn't walk. Everyday the shepherd would carry him and the lamb began to know and love the shepherd's voice. By the time the lamb's legs were healed, he knew the shepherd's voice so well that he stayed close to the shepherd instead of going out into danger.

Sometimes it's so easy to focus on pain and hard things. There's one instance I can remember in particular from a couple years ago--it was so hard to understand why God would allow that and I really withdrew from Him. About a year later, though, He brought the above story to mind--and I saw that instead of letting Him hold me and allowing healing, I kept trying to get away from Him, kept trying to walk on my own, thus reinjuring myself.

I love the picture the Bible gives of God being like a mother hen who guards her chicks with her wings. There's a song in Spanish that says, "Protected beneath your wings, I will give you my love, oh Lord. And with joy, I will raise up a new song and you will transform my being."