Plunged into a Whirlwind

So, my time of getting back home has been strange for me. It mostly feels like the timeframe for everything I expected to experience when I got home has been pushed back in unexpected, vaguely unpleasant ways.

First there was the delay of my flight home. The first leg was delayed seven hours, and then I had to fly four hours only to spend the night in Memphis. I had intended to spend the night in my own bed and getting to reunite with Kirk and Solomon and Diva. I was disappointed to be spending the night alone in a grungy hotel room with a dying cell phone and without a change of clothes, a comb, or even a toothbrush.

As you girls know, we didn't get much sleep during our time together. This is something I am pretty happy about because it means that time was spent talking with you girls, getting to hear the real deal about what's going on in your lives and hearts. Those late-night conversations are what I think God most used to bring us to this point of walking together through this season of ebenezing.

But it also means that limited sleep and two days of travel translates into one very tired girl who has no concept of a sleep schedule. I got home and crashed for several hours. When I woke up, it was 8:30pm and I felt like I was ready to start my day. I discovered my Spring Arbor community had cropped up online and so I began to orient myself to the online interface, the orientation syllabus, and the discussion board forums. Later, I got the idea to create the photo montage of our trip and worked on that for several hours.

All of this was a lot of fun, but it means I didn't go to sleep until 5:30 this morning. When I woke up at 1:00, I felt sluggish and slightly behind. This was compounded by my discovery that there was much more taking place in the Spring Arbor interface than I'd realized last night. I had found the orientation module, but there was also a whole other module for my first official class that had been posted and active for about a week.

I don't know how it happened that I wasn't clued in to this first class module before today, but somehow the announcement for it had never shown up on my school portal homepage. It felt overwhelming to realize that I need to navigate through two class interfaces right now (the orientation module and the first "real" class module), making sense out of both of them, getting to know both professors, and trying to figure out what is expected of me and when for each.

But beyond that, it feels distressing to discover how far behind I am in the discussion board forums with my classmates. Whereas last night I was flying high and totally thrilled to have discovered the orientation forum and get caught up on all the introductions and discussion threads, today I feel totally behind and lost and out of the loop. I'm struggling against a message in my heart that says I'm going to be left behind and that it's too late for me to be part of the group.

None of these things could have been helped. I couldn't control what happened with the flight delays, and I couldn't control the need for sleep. I couldn't control, either, when I found the information online about my classes, because I had contacted the school before the trip and thought I had all the information I needed already.

What this means is that I'm having to learn how to sit in the whirlwind that is now surprisingly swirling around me. I'm having to be gentle with myself and take things one baby step at a time. I'm having to trust that I will not be forgotten and that my classmates will want to know me once I finally get caught up and can enter into the fray. I'm having to trust that everything is just as it should be and there will be grace for me in this place.