Sleep Deprived

A series of much too late nights and I have reached Friday with dark circles under my eyes and yawns escaping at an all too frequent rate. I am tired. Tired, tired, tired. It is an effort simply to keep my head held up and my eyelids open. And so, I need to formally lodge some complaints... with myself....

1. Carrie Sue, it is time to recognize that you're getting old. You cannot fully function on 6 hours or less sleep per night. In fact, you probably wouldn't do well on less than 7 hours for more than one consecutive night. In exactly 2 months, you will be 30. Yes, 30. Since you have never been that 20-something girl who still parties like she's a co-ed (nor did you do so when you were actually a co-ed), there is no reason to think your body has been properly trained for such minimal amounts of sleep even if it's for the sake of watching The Big Bang Theory episodes on your boyfriend's couch rather than getting wasted.

2. Why do you insist on sacrificing the essentials when you are crunched for time and/or energy? Prayer, exercise, reading - have you seriously not yet learned that these are not the things to be set aside when you're having a week like this one? Oh, foolish, foolish Carrie Sue. You have spent oh so many years learning this lesson. You must have a remarkably thick skull.

3. Sleep deprivation = crankiness = you are not all that pleasant to be around. Do your loved ones a favor and get some rest.

On the Lack of Beaches In My Life

There is a terribly sad lack of beaches in my life. As far as places on this earth go, it is hard to find any I enjoy more than a good beach. I have not traveled to Europe - a significant caveat, I'll admit. That fact aside though, what I wouldn't give to be near a great beach. By great, I mean soft sand, lengthy for walks and jogs, shallow near the shore for putting only my feet in but much deeper further out for a good swim. No scum or stench from industry further up the shoreline. It should be within a 30 minute drive from home, under 15 minutes is ideal. Sunsets there ought to be spectacular. I'm thinking of Good Harbor Bay or Point Betsie. Grand Haven and Holland, though those are busier. Naples, FL was lovely too. Or Ponte Vedra, trading the sunsets for sunrises. I live in Wisconsin... on the Lake Michigan side of Wisconsin... it should not be so hard to spend a day at a truly great beach. Alas, it is.

Rediscovering

On Saturday, I began reading Matthew Kelly's Rediscover Catholicism and it has me all fired up in the best way. His message has me recalling my love for this sort of material - spiritually themed, practically applied and authentically communicated. Oh how I love the Church. I neglect that love sometimes, letting it fall to the back of the line of the things that occupy my days. This book is an effective rearranger of that line.

The pages of the first chapters already host plenty of underlined passages and small margin notations. Plenty of statements Kelly makes have struck me as significant with a lot of, 'that is so true' moments. The one that's staying with me since yesterday reads, "God always wants our future to be bigger than our past. Not equal to our past, but bigger, better, brighter, and more significant. God wants your future and my future, and the future of the Church, to be bigger than the past. It is this bigger future that we need to envision" (pp. 23-24).

I've been thinking plenty about the future in recent days. Plenty. Sometimes I want to just stop thinking about it for a while and remember to be present in the present. However I can't claim I've thought about the future in such terms as Kelly suggests. What I love about this declaration, that God wants our future to be "bigger, better, brighter, and more significant," is the beautiful reality that when God wants something, He always, always makes a way for it to be possible. He doesn't do it for us. He makes it possible. This means that I can have that future. You can have that future. If God desires it, He will provide means necessary for you to attain it. And He does, undoubtedly, desire it.