What an amazing, beautiful blur! "You make all things work together for my good"

So, at the persistent recommendation of my friend, Ashia, I am forcing myself to sit still for a moment and reflect and write on the past few weeks.  My goodness!  What has happened?  Looking back at my last post, it's now been over a month, so I'll put a few bullet points down from that time, eventful as it was, and perhaps expound more in this or a later post.

- School Finished
- Return Home for Christmas - Family & Friends
- OneThing Conference - Kansas City
- ROAD TRIP - Heading west with Colin for the Rose Bowl!

 - School finished - Those were some brutal couple weeks of dozens of pages of papers, intense cramming (yep) for 4 finals, and gasp of exhaustion as I finished my "Leadership Development" cumulative essay final at 9:30pm the 22nd.  (If any UW administration is reading this, could we please change our finals schedule to not run right into Christmas?  Thanks.)

- Return home for Christmas - Long story short, a combination of circumstances made taking my car home, in its damaged state, unfeasible, but my friend Jenny amazingly was heading the same way to the Cities and offered a ride with her sister.

   - Family - After a great ride, I was greeted by 22 other family members!  We had a raucous time the 23rd, 24th, and Christmas day, catching up on the year.  Truth be told, I was a bit exhausted from the previous couple weeks and unable to fully emotionally engage with the rich times with parents, siblings + spouses, and eight (soon to be nine!) excitable nephews/nieces.  I got a special treat of an extra couple days at Sarah & Mark's with their family and with third oldest, Peter and his wife Kristin, as their flight back to the East Coast was pushed back a day.  Great conversations were had, for which I am so grateful.  It's good to be the sixth of seven!  (Great fun going with Daniel, Jonathan, Chloe, and parents to the dentist's office; there were massive fish in the coy pond!)

   - Friends - Welcome back, Kevin & Sarah Orner!  Literally upon dropping Peter and Kristin off at the airport, I got to meet up with Kevin & Sarah, who, for the second time in four months, were picking me up from an airport. Haha.  (They were gracious enough to meet me upon arrival to Daytona Beach for their wedding in September.)  We got to catch up on their four months together in indigenous Panama.  What an amazing series of stories to hear--Sarah teaching English and Kevin continuing his work with locals, "teaching a man to fish", as the saying goes, with his engineering of water and sewage flow systems.  So proud of you guys!


- onething Conference - Kansas City (see following post)
- ROAD TRIP - Heading west with Colin for the Rose Bowl!


* I can tell already that this is getting too long, so I'm going to write some individual posts on the above two, rather amazing tales in their own right, hopefully sooner than later!

So grateful for it all...I'll leave you with a favorite song of mine in this year, which has certainly been an accurate description of "...God working all things together for my good." (see Romans 8:28).