Stressed? Trust and Priorities

The topic last night at youth group was stress. Simple, right? It doesn't sound like such a big deal to many people. Nobody gets "stress leave" from work or school. Even when homeschooled, if I went to my mom and said "Hey Mom, I need a day off. I'm stressed" she would laugh and say "Me too. Get used to it" or "Welcome to the world, that's the way things are." And obviously it would be silly to even try, because things need to be done no matter how we are feeling at certain times. So maybe we could expect the discussion to err on the side of "Get lots of sleep and eat extra chocolate."
Oh wait. Not that simple.
The evening opened as a young woman I have known for many, many years shared about how trusting herself instead of God to cope with the stress of her senior year of high school sent her into a horrible downward spiral. She was being self-destructive to an extreme degree, and hit rock bottom before finally deciding to trust God instead of herself.
Trust was the lesson they emphasized, but the one that hit me was about prioritizing. She placed school above her relationship with God, focusing on how her grades were instead of how Jesus had redeemed her. It seems that it is an extremely common mistake to make, putting grades or work or that sort of thing above faith in God. It's really important, though, for Christians to view that with a God-centered perspective: grades are all well and good, but they are ultimately not the most important thing to be focused on. In the end, ultimately, it isn't going to matter whether we're getting As or B+s or even C-s (though that might be a factor in where God sends us on earth). It's not going to change eternity.

Spring

It's spring! We've had a bit of snow but it's gone now.
The play went off wonderfully, as every audience member I've talked to said. People worked hard, the transitions went well, et cetera.
Now, we're getting ready to perform Hamlet next year. This means working hard to know the play really well. The family my younger brothers and I are staying with while Mom and Dad are at my older brother's boot camp graduation is a family that goes to our church, our youth group, and also do theater, and whenever we want to get together in between. (It's a running joke between us that we might as well move in with each other.) We read/performed a couple of scenes from Hamlet last night and started trying to learn the characters we want to audition for.
My older brother graduated from boot camp yesterday! My younger brothers and I got to Skype him, and he looked very snappy in his dress uniform. He still doesn't get his computer yet, but he has his cell phone and can call us more often now. We're really excited about this!
Now that the extremely eventful past few weeks are over, the letdown is starting to kick in. However, it's going to be gone soon, because performance season for fife and drum is incoming at frightening speed. The beginning of the performance season is possibly the busiest time. Parades, musters, and random events that are neither parades or musters. It's getting stressful learning the drill and the music and everything well enough to perform as a flawless unit in front of a bunch of other units that know what a performance should look like.
And summer is already on its way!

Life, the universe, and everything

So I'm really sorry for having been so inactive lately. So much has been going on, yet there feels like there's been so little to actually talk about. So here's a brief synopsis of life.
My older brother is almost finished with bootcamp - he graduates later this month. From there, it's off to intelligence training.
Our dog had surgery on her leg because she tore he ACL. She's limping around the house with one bald leg where they had to make incision.
We're in the midst of Production Week at theater, and it is really hitting home to me how difficult Merchant of Venice is to perform, not because the acting and lines are difficult to do or learn, but because for me at least it is tough emotionally. The hard scene is the one in which Shylock the Jew, who has lost his daughter and most of his wealth, comes up and blames my character (Salerino) and his friend Solanio. Salerino and Solanio actually helped steal Shylock's daughter, and what do we do? We taunt him, we mock him, and while Solanio tries to get Salerino to leave, Salerino as played by me actually shoves Shylock and yells in his face. I've known "Shylock" for many, many years. He's been my "little" brother's best friend for pretty much forever.
And I put the fact that I'm a Christian in my bio, sent it in, and THEN remembered that we're performing Merchant and who I am in the play. Oh well, it's just a play. People will understand that.
On the other hand, we have a lot of fun together. When not acting, we dance to each others' music - recorder, fife, violin, viola, etc - or do random cartwheels and stuff. Or we play zombie tag inside or outside if possible. We swish our costumes and use each others' names and each others' characters' names interchangeably. Hey, we've spent a ton of hours around each other, especially this week with seven-hour rehearsals every day. We're tight by now, even those of us who are new, like me.
My college Children's Literature course is also going swimmingly. We read kids' books to our classmates, research authors and illustrators like Robert McCloskey and Eric Carle, and study the history of kiddie lit.
Youth group is also excellent. We just had a short retreat in which we wandered around the city wherein the church is contained being filmed by our youth pastor while wearing ridiculous costumes. I wore a cheese hat, which led to many people assuming I was a Packers fan. We went to a restaurant where they cook what you want right in front of you, and I asked the chef guy to cook my hat. He took it, gave me his hat, put mine on and invited me in to cook. I cooked my lunch and that of this random other customer. And yes, this was caught on video. We also played trampoline dodgeball, soccer in the springtime mud, and went ice skating. I spent all evening clinging to friends' hands (and feeling the love - they were extremely helpful and compassionate) and to stacked milk crates. This because I can't skate.
Also, I stole an idea from Compass and instituted the youth group Smile Card. When someone makes you smile, if you are the holder of the Smile Card, you write in their name with an arrow pointing from yours to theirs, and give it to them. It began in the morning, and by the evening it had changed hands more than twenty times. The magic thing about this card that Sweet n' Spazzy, who started the Compass Smile Card, probably intended, is that receiving the Smile Card makes you smile. It makes you happy, knowing that you made someone else happy. The Smile Card brings still more smiles to the group.
So, looking forward to first performances this weekend (although NOT looking forward to missing youth group for the next two weeks) and to my big brother regaining access to Skype, that's where I am right now.