Amusement Park- Jwilla (Journal Entry 3)

Sometimes I feel like my life is an amusement park. And I have free tickets  to all the rides. And only an hour to do everything. Naturally I want to try everything but that means I must sprint to every single ride and try to enjoy myself at each so I can truly know which ones were my favorites to recommend to other people. So by the end of the day I'm drenched in sweat, exhausted, hungry, probably sunburned, but really happy with a permanent smile on my face. Haha That's pretty close to day to day life for me.

I mention the amusement park analogy because I've been slacking on my journal writing and my art projects. After I got up to 7 projects done and 2 journal entries, I started to be trained to be a server at Chuck A Rama, one of three jobs I've been doing this summer, and spending lots of time with friends, family, and dating. It's been fun and I don't regret any of it. I'm just behind, sweaty, and tired. Haha But I live for this life style. It's who I am and I figure it's how the rest of my life will pan out. How exciting to live a sweaty lifestyle of a zombie...;) (ps. I love it)

So now that it's the 16th of July and we're under two weeks until departure for Tonga, my mind has been racing and I've been making a lot of lists. Most of the time I'm in this state of numbness both physically and emotionally with an occasional laugh for excitement and tears of sadness to leave. It still seems pretty surreal that we're actually doing this. We're actually going to live and teach in another country...and we're doing it for almost 3 months. Since we still haven't really been given too much instruction on teaching or on the living situations, I've blocked any preparations for those places from forming in my mind and have tried to keep myself open to anything... And everything. I remind myself it's only 10 weeks and think back to when I was preparing for 18 MONTHS and how I felt then. The preparation has been similar yet so different, and grasping the reality of it feels the exact same. You get called to a foreign place, usually one you've never been to, you don't know where you'll live, you who will meet or be with, you know to some extent at least what you'll be teaching, but the routines, the schedules, the environment, the people are all new and that's fine! We pack up our bags and we head out on missions and it's no real big deal. 

This experience feels so similar. 

And I grew so much and did so much in the few amazing months that I was a full-time missionary in Chile, I can only wait to see what comes from this time in Tonga.