Missionaries - Present and Future

I need to get to bed before it's too late, but I'm leaving my beloved computer for a few days and figured I should put up a post, lest I find rabid, spleen extricating, Cap'n-deprived followers awaiting my return on Sunday.
Where am I going, you might ask? To Arches National Park, would be my answer. What will I be doing there? Scraping my knees up on rocks, probably falling off quite a few of said rocks, hiking, eating tin foil dinners, freezing to death... Yanno. Experiencing the wonders of the great outdoors. ^______^ I really do enjoy it all - except the part where I freeze to death, of course.

I'm just going to jump around with the big things that I can remember from the past week.

Saturday, I got a call from my momma during DnD. She said that she and the youngsters were attending a session of The Best of EFY down at SVU. Aaah... EFY. It makes me squee on the inside and out. ^__________^ I'm thoroughly convinced that working for that program is the single best job on the face of this planet. Light, I hope I can do it again someday.
Of course Chynna was glad to be there because of the opportunity to socialize with her boyfriends (one on each arm and all that) - I hope she got a little more out of it than flirting.
And Casey - oh, that boy. He grumbled and complained and drug his feet the whole way, but once he got there, he had a wonderful time and told Mom he was glad he came. ^__________^ My hope lives on! Out of the 7 boys that our family has raised, Casey is the only one that I can honestly hope for where the prospect of a mission's concerned. The church has never been more than a chore to any of them. Something your parents make you do. Casey doesn't really have a solid testimony or anything at this point, but with the right prodding, he'd be so much more willing to make it a priority than any of the others, I think.
Casey's a lot like me. More than anyone else in the family. I've seen his notebooks filled with snippets of stories, sketches of characters with extraordinary powers, and song lyrics. I've watched him fight imaginary battles in the backyard with the cheap decorative swords he inherited when I left for school. I wonder if he knows just how similar we are.
I worry about him a lot. Even if he did excel at art, sports, hunting, music, acting, school, popularity, creative thinking, or whatever, so what? Like Ron Weasley, he's at the end of the line in a huge family, and there's no real motivation for him to do well at anything because it's all been done already by his older siblings and cousins. We've got so many different talents that there's really nothing left he's found that could be uniquely his.
Although there are many other great reasons I hope he'll serve a mission, one of the biggest to me is that this is something he can do that will really allow him to shine - something he can be proud of and feel real accomplishment for. He has the potential to do something that none of the older boys ever will and that they'll regret not doing years later. I'm just holding onto my hope that someday he'll be the example that they all should have been to him.

...And I really wandered off there. Back to Mom's phone call - she called to give me what could be the best news I've heard in... well... I'm not sure when I last heard news this good. Flashback!
At my first youth conference, I became friends with two awesome boys - Will and Sam. Will especially became a very close friend. I'll admit, I crushed on him for quite a while too. He had an amazing smile and cute curls and watched anime, okay? They graduated two years before I did, and seeing them go really upset me. We tried keeping in touch, but after about a year and a half, the calls stopped and they effectively fell off the face of the earth. Why were they still home so long after graduating, you may ask? At least in Will's case, he was the only real active member in his family and had to raise the money for a mission himself. Honestly, after about a year, I'd more or less given up hope that he'd ever go. I haven't heard from him or Sam in over three years and never expected I would again.
So this past Saturday at the EFY activity, my mom happened across a boy that looked an awful lot like Sam. Happened to be a younger brother. She asked a few questions and it turns out, Sam has 4 months left of his mission here in Utah while Will has 6 months left on his in Japan. I was so happy, I came dangerously close to crying right there in the middle of our DnD game - where I happened to be when Mom called to tell me this.
I ended up doodling a sketch of a missionary with a smile and a mop of curls in church the next day. One of the guys who saw it commented on the fact that he didn't have a proper missionary haircut. Yes, I know that Will's hair is probably a lot shorter now, but I can only picture him as I knew him. ^____^() Ah, well.

Concerning other friends from years long past (though she's still around), EJ and I FINALLY got Calli to read the Twilight series. Yaysquee! XD Not only is it good to have another fangirl follower converted, Calli and I also made a deal that's very good for me. I put in an equal amount of studytime to her time spent reading that series. So I now owe her twenty-two and a half hours worth of homework. Edward Cullen may be the best motivator I've ever had. Haha.
And while we're on the subject of motivation - I'm finding mine again. In the last two weeks, I've played soccer, ultimate frisbee (twice), hiked, gone swimming, and ran 6 miles (two nights, 3 miles each). It feels so great to be active again! Even though my muscles have made some protests and I spazz whenever a frisbee comes my way, I've loved every bit of it and don't want to stop for anything.

And now for the sad news - it looks like I may not go to Alaska this summer after all. It's not all sad, though. I've discovered that rather than trying to earn enough money to pay back my student loans in July, it would probably be better to enroll in a new school, resume my student status, and forgo the loans until we can really afford to pay them back. So I'm doing some research on UVSC and talking to counselors about how to transfer credit from there back here to BYU. I have a really good feeling about this route. It'll allow me to make some progress with my GE's a lot sooner, rather than just waiting for my suspension to end. Now that I have a real goal and I know what it is I want to do with myself education-wise, I'm anxious to get back into the game and make some good things happen.

And on a closing note: I come from an awesome family. How many people my age have grandparents that could flip a truck three times, total the vehicle, and take no more damage than a few broken ribs? My granddad did last week. That's right. We're built to last. ^____~


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Quote - "The spaces between your fingers were made so someone else's could fill them."
Music - "Rebel, Rebel," David Bowie
Mood - Artistic