This is All I Can Handle.

I feel frantic. I think this is the week when everything is due and everything will be late. This is going on week two of being sick. At first, I enjoyed being sick, to be honest. It was a chance to slow down. To pause. To sleep. Now, I'm out of time. I don't have time to go to bed early, and my morning starts at six. When I do sleep, nightmares meet me in the darkness, refusing to allow me peace in the time of rest.

When I read about what is going on in other countries, I feel ashamed at how little I can handle. All the RAs got a free book yesterday, "Into the Mud". It's a compilation of stories of Africa (something I would much like to write someday). I took it off the table and placed it in my purse thinking, "I'd just feel guilty anyway."

But see, there are days where this is all I can handle. There are days where this life takes all the strength I can muster. I know I'm just a middle-class, white girl with average grades and average accomplishments. I know I don't deserve the sympathies of the government or the attention of Student Aid. And what they can lend me isn't wouldn't be what I want after all. The other day I was on facebook and my friend's status said, "When God made time, He made enough of it." Clever. But really? I don't feel that way today.

What I'm wondering this morning, before I rush off to babysit and then to class and then to a meeting and then to a recital and then to bake brownies for that meeting tomorrow and then to a one-on-one with a girl on my floor and then to finish that housing paperwork and then to homework by the truck loads, is what will last? We don't get to mark much of our day with "eternity bound", do we. There's not much here that will last. As I look around at my schedule and all the things I have filled my life with, I wonder what will burn and be forgotten? And what will be of eternal quality?

And what do we do with the rest?