Ebineezer Scrooge Ain't Got Nothin On Me

So there once was a guy named Samuel.  He was a prophet.  He was sent to tell the Israelites that they were not doing so hot.  He told them to repent and that if they did, the Philistines would stop kicking the crap out of them.  They did, and then asked him to pray for them.  Being a prophet, he was kind of a big deal, so Samuel prayed.  The Philistines saw all the Israelites in one place and thought, HEY! This will be like shooting fish in a barrel, except they didn't factor in that whole 'God' thing.  The Israelites, freshly repentant, were saved.

Samuel laid a stone between the Israelites and the Philistines, calling it Ebenezer, and declared that the Lord had helped them to that point.  Ebenezer has since been known as the stone of help.

On June 18, 2011, I set out to run a marathon.  It was something I had decided to do in honor of a friend, it was something I followed through with because it had a lot of meaning for me, it was something that gave me a cause and it was something that made me work towards something.  I did it to feel closer to my God.

I could hardly eat the night before.  My dad forced some spaghetti down my throat and I mulled around the house all night trying to sleep.  I woke up that morning terrified.  I kept repeating to my dad that this was the most scared I have ever been.  He would reassure me that I would be fine and reminded me of all the training I did.

The first song on my shuffle was Ke$ha.  I knew it was gonna be a good run.  I said a prayer for Brittni and then I was off.  Lets just say that the first 4 miles I was on fire, and then the next 10 were brutal.  By half way I wanted to die because I had ascended the entire way!  When I got to the highest point of the race there was a couple sitting there, they happily said, 'Its all down hill from here!' I almost burst with excitement.

As I came down the halfway point, my cheersquad was there.  They are the best friends that anyone could ask for.  I was so grateful to have them and to be honest, felt more of Brittni in what they did for me than even running the race.  They were there every few miles with words of encouragement.

At about mile 20 I saw my dad for the first time.  He could tell I was spent, and so he was there every two miles after that with a popsicle.  He would cheer me on and tell me where I would see him next.  It was so awesome.  It gave me smaller goals to look forward to.

In the end, I finished.  And all I have to say is that it is by divine help that I did.

This summer, I lay my Ebenezer here in Alaska.  I have learned so much about myself, I have learned about what I want to be.  I have learned about doing the right thing, even when it is hard, about repenting when it hurts.  I have learned about my family, who my friends are, and I have learned about laying down a rock in places where I have struggled, but where I have felt the Lord with me.

Come, Thou Fount of every blessing,
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
Sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it,
Mount of Thy redeeming love.

Sorrowing I shall be in spirit,
Till released from flesh and sin,
Yet from what I do inherit,
Here Thy praises I’ll begin;
Here I raise my Ebenezer;
Here by Thy great help I’ve come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home.

Jesus sought me when a stranger,
Wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
Interposed His precious blood;

How His kindness yet pursues me
Mortal tongue can never tell,
Clothed in flesh, till death shall loose me
I cannot proclaim it well.

O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.

O that day when freed from sinning,
I shall see Thy lovely face;
Clothed then in blood washed linen
How I’ll sing Thy sovereign grace;
Come, my Lord, no longer tarry,
Take my ransomed soul away;
Send thine angels now to carry
Me to realms of endless day.

So here's to you Ebenezer.  Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

TMFH: Self Portraits

I hope you love this face

Cuz you are gonna see it in every album of every vacation/graduation/baby birthing/exciting event photo album we ever have.

Just giving you fair warning.

Remember when I posted on a regular basis?

I do.

I actually have about 5 posts that are drafted out or outlined or half written or are in my head and I want to write them down, but I haven't made the time.  Summers are so busy!!  And I don't really know why I feel like this takes precedent over the marathon post, but it does.

I love the random situations I am privy to.

I have two really unrelated/really awesome mini stories to share.  I hope you won't think I'm weird.

#1
The day before the race, I was pretty busy at work.  Every other Friday is what we call a 'double ship day', which for you non-tourist job people means that there are not one, but TWO cruise ships in which means that my little town of 275,000 pretty much triples in size.  Its a busy day for me, but I try to make it as enjoyable as possible.  Before one of my tours I chatted it up with a gentleman who had a Team in Training hat on. (Side note, I am TOTALLY going to join TNT.  They are awesome)  He told me he was running the half and I told him I was running the full and that it was my first and that I wanted to crawl in a hole in die I was so nervous.  After the tour we got to talking and he told me that he ran his first marathon just 6 months after his first round of chemotherapy.  I told him that was amazing and asked him what type of cancer he had. 'Large B-cell Lymphoma'.  I started crying immediately.  I apologized and explained that my mom had been diagnosed in October with the same type of Lymphoma and that she had just finished a round of chemo AND radiation.  He teared up and we exchanged some conversation about it.  At the end, we took a picture and he told me he would look for me at the finish line.

#2
Yesterday, I got off a tour and was helping my passengers off the trolley. (P.S. if you didn't already know, I drive a trolley and it is AWESOME) I started to chat a bit with the people at the front of the line waiting to get ON, and as a man came off, he approached the man in the front of the line, shook his hand and announced which branch of the military he served in during Vietnam.  The man at the front of the line returned the exchange with his regiment number and type.  They shook hands and each said to the other, 'Welcome home brother.'


Now.  Neither of these two experiences have anything to do with the other, except for the fact that the both touched me deeply.  One because I knew that it was one of those moments when I could see God's hand in a chance meeting.  The other because here were two perfect strangers who were both 'anxiously engaged in a good cause' and it made me proud to be an American.

I may say that I hate my job, and sometimes I do, but I am so glad that I get to interact with so many different people.  I am not a fan of saying the same thing 585 times a summer.

But as you can see, Captain Cook is showing off his better side for you today.

Big Kid Pants

This post is about three weeks overdue, but I have been busy, alright?!?

The story:

I got a phone call while subbing a few weeks ago.  Like any good little sub I waited until passing period to listen to the message.  It was from a secretary at a high school in another district asking if I was available for an interview for a Spanish teaching position.  You better believe the next hour until school was out and I could call her back were excruciating. (read: I was literally counting down minutes and pushing kids out of classrooms so that I could call these people back.)

The second that beautiful bell rang at 2:45 pm (which in real time is about 2:53 because the ring the last bell manually and it NEVER EVER EVER EVER rings ontime) I was on that phone as fast as you could say Lightning McQueen in order to get that interview.  It went straight to voicemail, so I did what every self respecting job seeker would do.  I called three more times in a matter of three minutes.  Finally, I left a message in the hopes that I would hear back before the next century.  (Leaving messages is about the least affective way to get a job interview, FYI)

I plugged my phone into my car stereo and got on the road.  Imagine my surprise when my ringtone went off through my car speakers.  I looked at the number and then wretched the phone out of the connecter as quickly as humanly possible.  This is what ensued:

Me: Hello.
Secretary:  May I speak with Jody please.
(Country music starts to play through my ear piece)
Me: This is she...do you hear that?
Secretary: Hello?
Me: (More to myself than anyone else) Where is that coming from?
Secretary: (With a bit of a raised voice) I'm calling about an interview for a Spanish Teaching position.
Me: Hold...on...I can't...(Pulling the phone away from my face I realize that my iphone has tried to ibomb this phonecall with some itunes music. I frantically turn it off)
Secretary: Are you there? (sounding a little bit exasperated and annoyed)
Me: Yes, sorry, I am having some technical difficulties. yes I would love to come in!

The rest is boring. but I was about to DIE! I was so embarassed and thought I had blown in before I even went in.

I went home that night a googled the school and found out that guess what.
Did you guess?
Have you guessed yet?
You aren't guessing.

THE SCHOOL IS LITERALLY 6 MINUTES FROM MY HOUSE!

I'm not gonna lie, this made the school about a million times more attractive to me.  Then I started researching the school and it is really awesome, was just remodeled, and just seemed to really be on the same page as me as far as teaching beliefs and such.  I was really excited to get in there.

So I walk in and the first thing the principal asks me is, 'So, what congregation do you belong to?' Haha, only in Texas would that be an alright question to ask.  Turns out his brother is a member and we talk for a bit about that.  The rest of the interview was really amazing actually.  It was a chat with a bunch of people about education.  After about 30 minutes, (during which we all laughed quite a bit) the principal leans back and his chair and says.  'You're a risk, and I don't say that in a bad way.  You don't have much experience, but everybody needs to start somewhere.  You have a lot of energy and enthusiasm.  I like that.  We are very interested in hiring you.'  This is the part where I almost pee my pants.

Just one week later they offered me the job.

AND I ACCEPTED!!

So starting next year, I am the newest teacher at CYPRESS CREEK HIGH SCHOOL, home of the...

COUGARS!!

Could it be any more perfect?  I think not.

But I would have blamed country music if I didn't get the job. Just sayin.

TMFH: Road Trips

Driver picks the music. I hope you like Justin Beiber and Ke$ha, and me singing really loud.

TMFH: Auto Repairs

I am not your average girl.  I know how to:

Check/Fill my oil
Check/Fill my windshield washer fluid
Clean my engine
Change my head lights
Install a stereo
Change windshield wiper
Fill my tire with air
Clean it like its going out of style

BUT...

You better know what a strut is, because when I take my car in to get an oil change and they try to talk me into $1,000 worth of repairs, you are going to be my phone a friend life line.

Being Prepared...and other stuffs

I remember giving a talk in church soon after I returned home from my mission.  The topic assigned to me was 'Be Prepared' and specifically listed the parable of the 10 virgins.  Somewhere in preparation for that talk I decided that the oil that the 5 prepared virgins had was their testimony, and so I presented the idea as such.

Today, I was grateful that the Lord had filled my lantern in several different ways.

I was at work, but today, because of blessed standardized testing (note the sarcasm), I was in the counseling office answering phones and doing remedial office work-It.was.awesome.  If all I had to do all day was file papers, answer phones, look cute, and think of something funny to say to students as they waited to get into trouble, my life would be perfect.  I will be there tomorrow.  I am in substitute teaching heaven.

Anyways, I was sitting there, checking the spelling on the diplomas of the graduating class of 2011 when a woman walked in and in Spanish asked to see her son.  I explained that he was in testing and she said that he was a junior (they weren't testing today) and that they had a doctor's appointment.  She had a skirt and a matching blouse on, but had a dew-rag on her head.  I thought it was strange, but I have seen odder things, so I went about the process of locating her son and getting him to her.

As I continued to check the spelling of the worlds most awful names (a subject for another post), I looked up and noticed that she was watching me.  I smiled.  She smiled back and I thought I saw the glint of a tear.  I asked her if she was alright, and she burst into tears.  I rushed to the other side of the desk where she was sitting, put my arm around her and asked her what was wrong.

'Its just that this might be the last time I come to pick my son up from school.'  she cried.

'Why would you think that?' I asked.

' I have brain cancer, I don't know how much longer I am going to live.' was her reply.  Then she added, 'I am so tired.'

I started to tear up with her.  I confided in her that my own mother had just been diagnosed with cancer and that she too was much more tired than she used to be.  I asked her the treatments she was on, and was not shocked to find that they were some of the same ones my mother had done.  I told her that my mom was just now, a few months after her treatments, starting to get her energy, and that she couldn't think like she was going to be gone.  I told her that there was power in faith, that she needed to believe she was going to get better and in doing so she WOULD get better.  I promised her that if she would have faith in God's plan for her that everything would work out for the best, but asked her to be strong for her children, because they needed her to believe that she was going to be alright.

As I spoke with her, she was calmed.  I recognized the familiar, 'Asi es' and 'Amen Señor' phrases that I heard so often as a missionary, and right on cue, as she was wiping the tears from her eyes, her son walked in.  She stood up, he put his arm around her, and she said, 'Que el Señor te bendiga.'  May the Lord bless you.

I thought a lot today about the different things that prepared me for just that moment...The countless hours on my mission comforting those who stood in need of comfort, learning to speak the language and say things in a way that people would understand, hundreds of hours in university classrooms, hours on my knees pleading for my own mother's life...

And one night, preparing a talk for sacrament.