I'm am exhausted. Yesterday I almost had an emotional break down. There is so much going on and once again I've barely got my head above the water, and those crashing waves aren't helping me along. I keep dropping the ball, and I hate that, I hate showing up to class without my paper, or without the handout. My single pile of syllabi and textbooks and notebooks has morphed into 5, spread all over my room. And I don't have a book shelf, nor even the time to organize anything. It's a toss up between getting to class on time or finding the book in a pile of things I'm not even sure is part of this term. Then Lucas reminded me that I just need to keep on keeping on . . . There may be hoops we have to jump through, but God wants me to be a teacher, and so a teacher I'll be; God's worth it, the kids are worth it, so I'll do it.

Let me tell you a little bit about Daymond, my Diverse and Special Populations Professor. He's one of maybe 3 or 4 male professors in our MAT program, and the only black professor. He comes to us from inner-city Portland and teaching at Reed College, one of the most liberal colleges (Donald Miller writes a little about Reed in some of his books). He's about 5'6", athletic, extremely well dressed and bald. And he is a.m.a.z.i.n.g. Our class session today totally salvaged my entire week.
He created space today for us to share what was working and what was frustrating about the program. He is not a linear thinker at all, so it took over 4 hours for the 15 of us to share today, and it was lovely.

I struggle a lot with my decision to leave Anchorage for school. I love my comfort zone of familiar roads, schools, faces and beliefs. It has been a "tight-rope" walk for me, I want to see and experience the world but I like the safety of my family, my community . . . of being known, having relationships, and hating to say goodbye. But I would never go back and change my decision to come to Oregon, because I have gone through a transformation. I'm being given tools for critical thinking, transforming practice and promoting justice. I'm self-actualizing, I'm finding my own voice, I'm thinking for myself, I'm defining truth, I'm becoming more aware, and less self-centered.

I realized today during our sharing, well gosh, I guess I realized a lot of things. But I realized that there is a world beyond Anchorage, Alaska and Newberg, Oregon. The chapter here in Newberg will be ending soon, and I don't know where the next one will start. I don't know if it will be in Anchorage, or in Tacoma, or Clackamas, or the East Coast, or even in Ecuador. But I'm not worried about it, rather I'm excited. The possibilities are endless. I feel like I've lived in a self-induced cage and I finally realized that the door has always been open - I can go anywhere.