Rise and Shine.

I'm quite thoughtless today. It appears as if all that lack of sleeping is catching up with me. Usually in the summer I get more sleep than the school year., but thus far that's not the case. Last night was worth staying up late to Skype with my favorite Nikweeta. An hour and 45 minutes of talks of life, love, and happiness went by and not a giggle opportunity was missed. This morning I got up at 5:30 and my dad and I ventured to the yearly Dairy Fest breakfast. Accordion music and a line in the rain and a breakfast consisting of delicious cheese curds, cranberry muffins, eggs, not-so-good tasting coffee, milk and Juicy-Juice. Let me tell you, Wisconsin is probably the only state where people will wait in the rain for this. It's tradition. A tradition that I'm quite proud to have. And there is no one I would rather go with than my dad. I wore flip flops and it rained and he walks really fast so I said: "Dad, I can't walk real fast in these." And he goes: "Well, can you run?" What a funny man. This is the first year I didn't get a kiddie bag filled with wonderful Wisconsin treats like erasers shaped like cows and coloring books filled with cheeseheads and dairy. Really though? You miss one year of the Dairy Fest breakfast and you come back and bam- you're an adult. No kiddie bag. But I guess that's the way life works.

After that I took my neighbor to her therapy appointment and went to the coffeeshop while I waited. I had a pretty disgusting mocha latte (probably because it wasn't from Adam Bros). But even though the coffee wasn't up to par, God did an excellent job with my delivering my devotional for the day. I'm reading 'Set Apart Femininity' by Leslie Ludy. She's got some pretty great things to say. "We've been looking for beauty in the wrong place. And our incessant search for beauty has stripped us of all that is truly beautiful." That's pretty good stuff. And it's so true. We don't know where to search for beauty any more it seems. Our world has 'beauty' so readily available but it's not the kind of beauty that we truly need. She goes on to say: "We live in a world where radical abandonment to Christ means, at best, maintaining technical virginity until marriage and possibly going on a short-term mission trip every couple of years with an ipod, cell phone, and InStyle magazine." Gosh, that one's convicting. We think we've got it right but we've got is so wrong sometimes. I live so comfortably. I love so conditionally. I serve whole-heartedly so infrequently. I feel like it's so hard to live uncomfortably even though God demands it and I think our idea of 'uncomfortable' is probably way more comfortable than it should be. That's where we've lost it. We've been given so much and we've become so unappreciative to the point where we actually think that we deserve everything we have. I'm definitely guilty of that. How do we love unconditionally the way God loves us? We lose the meaning of what unconditionally is. Someone does something to upset us and there it goes., I just don't love them today. But we're the most imperfect things and God loves us so conditionally. And that is so amazing and I really think we loose the true meaning of what that really is. But I am eternally grateful for having a Savior who loves me so unconditionally.

Some important things to chew on:

• The women of the Tiwi tribe in the South Pacific are married at birth. Whoa baby. Literally.
• My dog has been sleeping on my bed all day. He's precious. My puppy on the other hand is a Little Rascal and has tried to eat pretty much everything in the house besides food. But he's still precious too.
• I'm super hungry. Right now and all the time.
• Apparently I was a bit more thoughtful today than I thought.