When one door closes, another door opens

Yesterday I left Champaign to come back home to Vancouver. I was all packed and ready and Katie dropped me off at the train station. We said goodbye and I hauled my luggage up to the second floor desk.
"Hi, I'd like a ticket for the train to Chicago."
"There are no trains going to Chicago this morning."
"What?"
I had looked them up online at least twice to check the schedule, and planned that I would catch the 8:00 train to get me to Chicago in time for my 2:00 flight.
"You might want to try Greyhound." The man said blankly and went back to his computer screen.
At the mention of greyhound I felt a wave of motion sickness come on, but I swallowed it back. It was my only option. I lugged my bags down the stairs and found the greyhound office.
"Hi, I'd like to catch a bus to Chicago."
"There are no buses going to Chicago this morning."
"What?"
Just a little hint of panic hit me. I was stuck in Champaign. 2.5 hours from Chicago and I had a flight to catch and no one to call if I needed help.
"Are there any other ways to get there?" I asked.
"You might try getting a shuttle." The woman said to me, "But it'll cost you a fortune."
I dragged my bags to the city bus and shuttle office.
"Is there any way I can get a shuttle to Chicago this morning?" I asked.
"Let me see...." The lady tapped away on her keyboard. "There is one this morning... oh wait, it's full."
She gave me a smile "I'm sorry."
"Is there any way I can trade seats with someone?" I asked hopefully. I had $40.00 in my purse and I'd hoped it would last me a lot longer than one day, but you gotta do what you gotta do.
The lady moved to a different computer. "Oh, actually, there is another shuttle today..." She said, "But it doesn't get to the airport in Chicago until about 1:00. Is that okay?"
A four hour bus ride. I could feel the wave of nausea.
"That'll be great." I answered her.
"Are you a student?" She asked.
"Yup."
"Well, then you get the student discount."
She handed me a ticket and I handed her $39.00. I sat down to wait for the shuttle and in my backpack I had a fortune cookie and I opened it up and it said "When one door closes, another door opens."
I took my car sickness medicine and when the bus finally came I squished in with all my bags and passed out. I slept most of the four hour journey (with my mouth open, nonetheless) and got to the airport and rushed inside. I checked in with Air Canada and went to go through security and there was a lineup of over 200 people. I tried not to panic. After all, what could I do?
A man motioned me aside and asked for my passport. He looked at it and my ticket and then pointed to a different lane.
"Go down there."
Yes! They were going to fast-track me through security! A woman greeted me at the door.
"Have you had this done to you before?" She asked politely.
Suddenly I didn't feel so jubilant. "Uh... what do you mean?"
"Have you had the 'four S's' of security?"
I had no idea what she was talking about but the four S's didn't sound that exciting. She told me to go into a little room with glass walls and stand on a little mat with my arms out while they searched me and emptied my bags and swabbed everything with little wands. When they were done with me I collected my dignity and my clothes and my bags and rushed down the hall to my plane.
Just in time, they were boarding. I got on and sat down next to a huge German man who wanted to talk about international business with me. The pill I took must've still been working because I passed out with my mouth open. I woke up as the plane was taxiing towards the gate in Toronto.
"Are we already there?" I asked, surprised.
"I can't believe you slept through that!" The man said to me. "That was the worst flight of my life! The turbulence was so bad that I was barely able to keep in my seat!"
Praise the Lord.
In Toronto I had to go through customs and security again and then I found myself sitting in a lounge waiting to board. An old man started talking to me. I told him how I was excited to be getting home that night, even though it would be 11:00.
"what do you mean?" He asked. "Our plane is landing at 9, not 11."
"It is?" My ticket had the wrong time printed on it and I hadn't even thought to calculate the time difference. Well, I would just call my mom and let her know I would be arriving earlier. I punched the number in my cellphone. Uh oh, no money left on my phone.
"Would you like to borrow my phone to make a call?" the man asked.
"Yes, thank you!"
The flight to Vancouver was not as fun. I had the window seat, next to a very large young man with the worst breath in the world and a very large lady. The young man was coming from Saudi Arabia and didn't speak English but wanted to talk. I told him Vancouver was beautiful and he managed to say "I... think... Vancouver is beautiful because you are there."
Boy, did I have a surprise in store for him. The last hour of the flight I suddenly began to get sick. I grabbed for that little paper bag and I started retching violently. It was horrible because I was actually making vomiting sounds that everyone could hear. The young man looked like he wanted to get as far away from me as possible, but the lady handed me some tissues and said, "Don't worry, I'm a nurse." (That made me chuckle cause I say the same thing to people.) Thankfully I hadn't eaten much that day (on purpose) but I still gagged for ages and by the time the plane landed I wished someone would put a gun to my head. I folded over the top of my little paper bag and just left it on my seat.
Someone helped me get my bags down and I stepped into the cool night air and felt so happy to be home on Canadian soil.
Some people love to travel. They love the excitement of the planes and trains and airports. I guess I do love it, in a way, but I think I mostly love the new places, not the actual journey. I am impatient to get there and I am impatient with the amount of suffering it necessitates. But I am constantly amazed at the little ways God works to protect me and take care of me and make a journey that could've been horrible, not be so bad after all.....Except for the vomiting in front of everyone, that is....

EXAMMMMMMMM!

For those of you who faithfully check my blog in the morning (which I think is a great thing to do, mornings are the best time of the day), could I ask you for a favor? Could you pray for my big exam, which will be taking place all day of Feb 18th?
I know I've taken kazillions of exams in my lifetime... most have gone well, although there have been some remarkable not-so-well ones. At any rate this will probably be the toughest exam of my life. So far. My mom was helpful in pointing out a few of years ago when I wrote the MCAT, "This is not the hardest one Heather, you've got even bigger challenges ahead in life."
I'm not sure if she meant to be comforting or just to tell me to suck it up, but it is a good perspective. Just like David was trained on lions and bears for his battle with Goliath... and at the time it may have seemed huge, but little did he know that he would spend the rest of his life fighting even bigger battles...
I feel like it is particularly wonderful and appropriate to write my exam on my birthday, because I can't think of a better birthday present than to have finished it. (Okay maybe there are better ones.)
Anyway, I would appreciate your prayers as I slay this 'manster' (that is the way an old classmate John used to pronounce it, with his thick Greek accent), and know that I also keep you in my prayers as you face life's challenges, whatever they may be.
love Heather

....what was I thinking?

Have you ever done something completely ridiculous that at the moment seemed perfectly reasonable, but afterwards, made you embarrassed just thinking about it?
Earlier this week I was studying super hard- for four days in a row I was putting in 14-16 hours and I was totally exhausted. Sometime during one of those days I was frustrated and annoyed and decided to go for a walk outside. I went out of the school and there is a park across the street and I started marching around the city block, talking to myself and praying. A man passed me by and said hi. I kept walking.
Halfway around the other side of the park, I ran into him again.
“Hi!” He said, “Nice day for a walk! Do you mind if I join you?”
He changed directions and fell in stride with me. I wanted to say no, I’m not interested in going for a walk with a complete stranger, but I was so caught off guard by his request that I couldn’t find the words to say no. (In retrospect, I could’ve just said ‘no’, but that didn’t come to me at the time).
He began to prattle on and on about his job as a computer programmer and how he liked to go for a walk during his lunch hour, etc. In the meantime, I was trying to formulate the words in my mind to say ‘please go away and leave me alone.’ Instead, I decided to try something that I’ve never tried before. I decided to scare him off by acting retarded.
Yes, I know it was ridiculous. But I did it. He asked me what I was studying and I put on a weird stilted accent and started flapping my hands and swaying from side to side.
“I--- am--- studying---- medicine---“ I stuttered.
He looked at me funny. “You mean to become a doctor?”
“Yes---- to---- become----a----- doctor.”
I made myself go cross-eyed and then rolled them back in my head. When I got to the end of the block I said goodbye and he walked hurriedly in the other direction. I walked into the school feeling rather pleased with myself.
But that is not the end of ridiculous things. After the end of this long exhausting week I went with Katie to the church young people’s winter retreat. We went to a little town about an hour away and slept in a cabin and played millions of board games and had fun together with 20 other people. I gained 5 lbs with all the junk food I ate, but it was fun nonetheless.
Sometime yesterday I decided to go for a little walk. Down the hill from the lodge we were staying at was a little lake, completely deserted this time of year, with a bridge and a boat house and dock and canoes and paddlewheel boats lined up on the shore. I looked at them for a bit and then decided that yes, it was a good idea to take one of the boats out for a spin. The only problem was…. The lake had ice on it. But it had warmed up a bit so I figured the ice was pretty thin and I could break through it and go for a little paddle.
I dragged one of the fiberglass canoes to the dock and pushed it into the water and the ice shattered all around it. I found a paddle in a little shed and then gingerly stepped into the canoe. In the air my breath was making steam and I hit the ice with my paddle and broke it up a bit and then started paddling.
Away from shore the ice began to get a bit thicker, but I discovered that I could lean over the front of the canoe and hit the ice, then paddle forwards a few feet, and then repeat. I was working my way along the shore but then started to get impatient with my progress. I decided I would have more leverage if I stood up and was able to reach farther with the paddle. So I was standing in the canoe, braced against the seat, reaching out and shattering the ice and then paddling. It was grueling work. The boat was rocking a bit but I wasn’t too worried about falling in. (Come on, that type of thing only happens in movies.)
I discovered that the boat would move forward without me paddling if I rocked back and forth a bit. So I started moving back and forth (sort of the same idea as pumping your legs on a swing so you can swing higher.) However, I had to be careful that I didn’t rock side to side, or so much that I fell over, so I braced myself securely and starting just thrusting my hips forwards and backwards to get moving. The ice would crack a bit and I would thrust my hips forward, and then thrust them back again and so on. It worked rather well, I thought, and I moved the canoe around for a bit like that.
After awhile I got tired even of that, so I paddled back to shore. I got out of the boat and pulled it out of the lake and lugged it up the hill to it’s place. Then I went for a walk in the woods for a while, tramping through the snow, and made my way back to the lodge.
I came in the door and was greeted by a bunch of smiling faces. Was there some secret I was missing here?
“So, Heather….” One of the ladies finally said, “We noticed you decided to take a boat out?”
“Yeah, we were kind of worried you might fall in.” One of the guys said, “So we were all standing at the windows watching you.”
I had forgotten about the big bay windows that overlooked the lake.
“I thought that dance you did was pretty good.” Another one of the girls said.
“Yeah, that whole hip movement thing was pretty funny.” Someone started laughing and mimicked my hip thrusting moves and they all cracked up.
I turned a few shades of red and laughed along with them, what else can you do? I bet that they were just jealous they hadn’t thought of taking one of the boats.
…. Unfortunately it is useless to try to convince people to make their own adventures. They either will or they won’t, but in my experience it is always more fun when you decide that it is worth the embarrassment and it is worth looking ridiculous. After all, we all will look ridiculous at some time or another in our lives, we might as well just get used to it.

Nightmares, skirts and poo

I’ve been thinking about my image a lot lately. Not so much my image, actually, but thinking about how I think about it. This week in school we were talking about adolescent health issues and I was surprised to learn that the average North American girl starts her first diet by age 12. I was surprised and then I thought back to when I was 12 and yes, that’s about right. I think my first one was ‘Heather’s health plan’. The next year, it was ‘Heather’s new and improved health plan’. Then ‘Heather’s health and fitness plan to end all plans’. And so on. Currently I’m on ‘Heather’s elliptical trainer butt-kicking health plan’.
The sad thing is that I’ve never been fat. But I’ve always obsessed over it. I think part of it stems from being teased as a kid, and while I’m sure it was never meant to be cruel, it stuck with me. I remember going out running when I was 16 or 17, with my short little running shorts, and my neighbor came out on his balcony wrapped in a ratty purple bathrobe and shouted, “Good morning, power thighs!” I wanted to die. My brothers lovingly nicknamed me ‘Heather the Hippo’. And it bothered me that I couldn’t fit into my beautiful skinny sister’s jeans and t-shirts.
I haven’t been happy about how I looked most of my life. I wanted thicker hair, bigger lips, longer legs, smoother skin, you name it. And I know I’m not alone in it. I remember reading about a woman’s conference where the speaker asked if any women in the audience were happy with their body. One woman out of 500 raised her hand. Isn’t that crazy? What is to be done about that? There isn’t enough Botox or liposuction or diets or hair dye or makeup or pretty clothes or plastic surgery or silicone implants or facemasks or curling irons, not anywhere in the world. You’ll never make a woman think her body is perfect.
“I praise you Lord,” Psalm 139 says, “Because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”
Why is it so hard to believe that?
I had this weird nightmare two weeks ago, which I’m sure was partly due to too much studying. In my dream, I looked in the mirror and discovered to my horror that I had a wide webbed neck, a flattened face with wide-set eyes, my skin was dry and flaky, and where I should’ve had breasts there was nothing.
“Oh my God, I’ve got Turner’s syndrome!” I wailed (Turner’s is a genetic disease where girls have 45X chromosomes instead of 46XX, and most cases aren’t as bad as my dream, in fact most girls look totally normal with it.)
I started to panic. Okay, Heather, breathe. Maybe this isn’t so bad. I looked in the mirror again. Gah!!!
I woke up and ran into the bathroom and was overjoyed to discover my own familiar features.
Then I had another crazy dream this week. I dreamt I was balding. I looked in the mirror and found that my hairline had receded several inches. Not just regular balding, it was hereditary male pattern baldness. Again I started to panic, and then tried to calm myself. Relax, Heather, maybe there’s a guy who likes big foreheads…
This week I bought a beautiful pink skirt for $5 at a second hand store. It is long and flowing, to the ground, with little silver sequins sewed on it and jangling bells at the waist. The weather finally warmed up a bit and I decided to go for a walk, wearing my new skirt. I was walking along feeling pretty good about myself, my new flowing skirt, my hair looked great….. As I walked by a car I looked in the window reflection to admire myself. Suddenly I felt something soft under my foot.
Yes, my dear reader, I had stepped in a pile of dog poo.
You can believe I felt stupid. I started walking through the piles of snow to try to wipe my shoes off and across the street there was an old man staring at me with a funny look on his face.
Farther along on my walk I came to a little creek with a bridge, but because so much snow has melted lately, the bridge was flooded. There was a big pipe that had fallen across the river with a birch branch hooked onto it and I decided to climb over the pipe. I was halfway across and doing pretty good, when my long flowing skirt got snagged on the birch tree. I didn’t want to rip it, but I couldn’t turn around and free it because I might slip off the pipe into the river, and I couldn’t go forward because there was another branch in the way. I tried to gather as much skirt up as I could and hold it out of the way with one hand, while balancing and trying to lift the birch branch up and away from me. I had a moment’s thought that yes, I was stuck on a pipe in the middle of the river with my skirt rolled up and my knickers probably showing, and yes, there were houses lining the bank on both sides. And yes, it would’ve been interesting to watch.
Without describing my contortions to release myself, I will tell you that I got away with only one large scratch on the back of my leg and a damp skirt and I considered myself lucky.
This morning I went to church with Katie and it was hard to sit down even in the comfy chairs because that elliptical trainer (3 days in a row!) has pulled every muscle from the waist down.
The pastor was talking about image and reputation and I began to feel that perhaps God was trying to tell me something. In fact, maybe he had been saying it for a while. Maybe those nightmares and the dog poo were all part of the message. Maybe he wants to tell me that he made me the way I am for a reason, and he loves the way I look, and I don’t have to constantly seek affirmation from other people to make me feel okay. Perhaps it doesn’t matter if I am fat or skinny, or short or tall, or have a webbed neck or a bald head. Perhaps God is looking at my heart and is more concerned with what he sees there, and wants to make that part of me beautiful.
“The Lord does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7)
There is no botox for the heart. But there is a treatment that creates an unfading beauty, I’ve heard.
“But let it be the inward adorning and beauty of the hidden person of the heart, with the incorruptible and unfading charm of a gentle and peaceful spirit, which is not anxious or worked up, but is very precious in the sight of God.” (1 Peter 3:4)
We spend so much energy on the outside, on how people view us, on trying to look good or act cool or sound clever. But the truth is, “I live before an audience of one. Before others I have nothing to prove, nothing to gain, nothing to lose.” (General Charles Gordon).

Moving house

I tend to complain about a lot of things that I shouldn't, and then there are other things I don't complain about, that I should.
Case in point: my living situation here in Champaign. I've had some pretty crazy landlords in my time (like one who rang our doorbell every day to ask how we were doing, and who I tricked into thinking I had grown up in a Masai tribe in Africa and was a pro spear wielder, in case he got any ideas.)
But my landlord here was pretty nice. He picked me up at train station when I got into Champaign and did whatever he could to make the house comfortable (like fixing the furnace when it was -27, buying a tea kettle, offering me rides.).... maybe too nice. I had thought I was moving in with two ladies and the landlord was in a separate suite, but we ended up sharing the kitchen, and the other girls were never there, and when they were there, they were either drunk, passed out, or screaming on the phone with their boyfriends and moms. (I kid you not, the amount of times I was woken up to hear one of them screaming profanities at their loved ones...)
Then I found out my landlord was married, but his wife lived in another state, so he was kind of lonely.... and most of the time I would come home from school exhausted and alone, late at night, and it was just us there. Creepy, huh? Saturday night one of the girls came home really late with her boyfriend and I could hear them stumbling around drunkenly, smashing things, yelling. Sometime in the wee hours of the morning one of them burst into my room and I woke up and told them to get out. No, maybe I should be the one to get out.
I'd met a really nice girl at the church I've been going to, she gives me rides to school on the days I don't ride my bike. I asked her if I could move in with her. She was more than happy to have me come stay in 'Chateau Katie', as she called it, so I moved in this weekend.
Like night and day! I walked into my room and almost cried. It was so beautiful. I sank into bed and it was like jumping into a cloud. I realized then that the whole month I'd been sleeping on a bed that had springs digging into my back, which probably explains why I tossed and turned all night. And not one, but two pillows! And a little carpet beside the bed! And the bathroom was clean! And Katie is a wonderful person and I can hang out with her and eat breakfast together in the morning and watch tv with her if I have time.
So I'm extremely happy and feel so blessed to be living there for the remainder of my time in Champaign. God doesn't always give us what we want, but he always gives us what we need, and sometimes a little more, just to tell us that he loves us.
This morning I woke up and pulled the curtains and looked out at trees and snow, and it was so beautiful, that I felt overwhelmed by God's goodness. So I knelt on my little carpet to pray, and couldn't stop smiling.