Word of the Year

Sorry the blog's been a little abandoned lately. After spending a week at home, I traipsed off to California for a lovely few days with old friends. (If I ever upload my photos, I'll post some). Then I worked at school for a week, helping with graduate admissions. And now I'm back, wrestling with the dissertation and starting to teach again.

It's going to be a daunting semester. Today alone, I've had a couple breakdowns about how on earth it will all get done. Then I remembered the amazing pep talk my friend Rick gave me in December. I think he originally called me to talk smack about my husband and their fantasy football league face-off. But somehow, we got on the topic of me, feeling pretty desperate. This is when he revealed to me his word for 2011 (a word he usually only reveals on New Year's Eve) - Believe. He kept telling me I just need to believe. Everything would happen as I needed it to; I just needed to keep believing that it would. My version of this is having faith. Not all that different from believe; it's just that faith is a word that grew on me last spring and now has particularly strong meaning to me. Also, faith is written on the beautiful necklace that Ben got me for Christmas, so it's easy to keep that word close to my heart.

So now I am trying to have faith that every closed door just serves to point me down a better path. Faith in my ability to accomplish everything I need to accomplish in the coming months. Faith that we will find a way to make things work come next fall, and that we will, somehow, have everything we need. Sustaining this faith is not easy. I've been particularly bad at it the past few days. But every morning, I am able to put on my necklace and start believing all over again. And that feels like a tremendous gift.