Faith, Grace, and Hope

The prompt asks: What do you think you'll be doing in 10 years? I have no idea.  God willing, my husband and I will be celebrating 18 years of marriage. And these two squirts will be 11 and 14 (yikes!)  Everything else will be a surprise. I ask God to help me see the surprises as revelations and blessings. Even eventually will work. 

NaBloPoMo Prompt:   Do you think of a decade as a short or long period of time? If I simply think "ten years"- that seems like a long time.  However, if I consider what's happened to me in the past ten years and what I can remember from 10 years ago... it can't possibly have been that long ago.  In the summer of 2004, I was finishing projects at KNOM  and getting ready to move from Nome to New Haven to attend Y ale Divinity School . (If I had been a better note taker or journal keeper, Nome to New Haven would have been a great book.) Rob and I got engaged in the summer of 2004.  I jumped in the Nome River, camped beyond West Beach, read news stories, and bawled my way onto an airplane, sobbing about leaving the Gold Rush City (which still holds a small piece of my heart).  I remember my first (homesick/Nome-sick) weeks at YDS, sweating in my small apartment and trying to learn the Hebrew alphabet.  All of that was ten years ago....

In trying to get back into regular writing, I'm revisiting NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month). The July theme is "decade", so be prepared for some random posts on that theme when I can't think of anything else to write. Today's prompt: Tell something you've been doing for ten straight years.  The only habit I've sustained for that long in consistently the same way is tracking what I read. That's actually a 12-year-old habit. In 2002, I set the goal of trying to read 100 new books each year. This was to break my serous re-reading habit. I didn't make it in 2002 (only 92), but I have each year since except for 2009 (70) and 2013 (96). Those two years just happen to be the two years in which I gave birth.  The lists tell me more than they tell you. Without looking at the year page, I know this is from 2007. I remember the voracious appetite I had for anything that would distract me from Robs impending deployment. Home from Yale...