Gratitude

It’s over!

Last night I passed the final stage of my PhD comprehensive exams. I am now a PhD Candidate. 🙂 I could not stop grinning or laughing on my drive home from school yesterday. The process went so well and work and uncertainty of the process was all lifted so suddenly and dramatically, I had no idea how good it would feel to cross this line. During my oral exam, I almost started to feel like a colleague among these older, wiser professors who have taught and challenged me in recent years. My advisor even said that he wanted to show me an article by someone to hear what I thought of it! What *I* thought. Crazy. I am so grateful that this was the outcome, that I know at least something that might be able to serve the church and others, that my work and questions that often felt insurmountable in fact led to something good. And I am so very grateful for all the people who have helped encourage and pray for me during this intense process the past two months (and put up with me not really being around – at all). I could not have gotten here without you!

I am also so grateful that it is December – it means that I am done with homework for a month, able to fully enjoy and jump into the Christmas season, call friends again, blog again, breathe and sleep again! I love Advent, I love the preparations of the holiday, I love the spiritual significance of remembering God with us, love the memories and the smells and the lights and the music… 

And we had a wonderful trip in Italy (pictures coming soon), another thing that I am very grateful for. I have such a profoundly meaningful relationship with my husband, and Italy was a gift of time to explore, rest, laugh, and love with him in the midst of a lot of crazy and stressful realities. I am so grateful for him and how he makes me, me, and all that I learn about life and strength and grace from him. I am very aware that even when life is full, even sometimes too full (as this past year has felt for me), God gives us people and experiences and supports to keep moving ahead.

I am relaxing today in this open, new space of gratitude after a long season of pushing and questioning. I am pausing to remember and to be grateful today – and am so blessed to even be able to do this. I also know that many others are not in an open space, or are still in spaces that are dark, painful, full of questions, of grief or loneliness. Even when the spaces pinch and pull, even when movement and healing seem non-existant, even when you don’t see others along the hard part of the journey with you, remember this: life is movement, God is loving you right now, and others are walking along with you until you can reach the clearing at the end. That sense of movement, the reality that our lives are not ours to control and fix and mediate, the reminder that God is in the darkness and the openness – He is even more present in the tight places - is another thing I am grateful for.

“It is only with gratitude that life become rich.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer