The Teacher Is Always Quiet During a Test

I have been having a rough go of it lately: a lot of things on my mind and far too much idle time to feel sorry for myself about this and that. I really do have good days, but sometimes the bad days outnumber the good days and that's when I get very overwhelmed and anxious about everything. I can handle school related anxiety, but when it comes to my personal life I can hardly bare the hours I'm awake during the day. This has left me thinking a lot about why I become so frustrated with God and at the same time completely hateful toward myself. Sometimes I just want to tell God that I'm tired of trying and that I just want him to give me a straight up answer to all my problems that will fix everything. He rarely makes any test of my character easy... actually, I don't think he's ever designed any test of mine to be easy. I always learn the hard way even if I try my hardest to think through my issues clearly.
Yesterday I stumbled upon this quote:

"When you are going through something hard and wonder where God is, remember the teacher is always             quiet during a test."

Touche, God. I then began to think more and more about this and came upon Genesis 22:1-3 where it talks about Abraham and Isaac.

1 And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and     he said, Behold, here I am.
 2 And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah: and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee. 
 3 And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him.

Hopefully we all know that next Abraham is fully intending to carry out God's will, even though he loves Isaac more than anything else in the world, and when Abraham is about to sacrifice Isaac, God stops him and tells him that he is well pleased with Abraham's obedience. Abraham was no doubt wondering why God wanted him to perform this seemingly unthinkable task but was willing to do it anyway. He probably wondered where God was after He commanded Abraham to do this thing. Why wasn't God telling him that everything was going to be alright? Why would God want him to do that in the first place? Why wasn't God answering Abraham's silent pleadings to spare his son and think of something else to sacrifice? Where was God? God was there, but he was watching silently to see if Abraham had enough faith to do something so unbearably hard because he had more faith in the higher powers than he did in his own thoughts.
I must admit that if God demanded that I murder someone that I love dearly because He said so, I would probably snort and move on with my life, ignoring what he asked me to do. But that's really the way a lot of us approach hard tasks that are set before us. I know that when I'm faced with something hard, I often want to completely shut it out and hope that it eventually disappears. I just don't appreciate struggle; sure, I appreciate the results of my struggles when they're positive, but I detest struggling like I do most of the time. I too wonder where God is and why won't he remove this burden from my shoulders because I don't think I'm strong enough to get through. I can always feel God's thought process though: "Come on Christine, we've been through this many times before. You can do it, don't tell yourself otherwise. I can't help you with things you need to figure out on your own. I'm not here to hold your hand, that's what you have your brother Jesus for. In fact, Jesus will even carry you if you'll just let him."
Great. Now I feel bad. Every time. I know that I'm not the only one who just looks to the sky and wonders why things have to be so difficult. I love Heavenly Father, I really do, but I wish that he'd just give me a break more times than he does.
Which brings me to the past two days. As I said previously, I have been having a really rough go of it as of late and have been hoping that something wonderful would come along. Well yesterday I received a wonderful letter from a friend and today I got flowers. For the first time in a long time, I felt pure joy. I've never gotten flowers before and it really, truly made me feel completely blissful. I was able to handle a pretty busy and confusing first day at work with a good attitude and a positive vibe because of those two things. So Heavenly Father blessed me through two people who I care very much about. I keep forgetting that I usually receive blessings that way. For me to feel joy and to smile to myself every time I think of what those two people did for me, is an incredibly big deal. I'm usually so inside my head that I can't seem to get out of my mind palace without some major complications.
After thinking all these thoughts and pondering the story of Abraham and Isaac, John 14:27-29 came to mind:

27 Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.
28 Ye have heard how I said unto you, I go away, and come again unto you. If ye loved me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father: for my Father is greater than I.
29 And now I have told you before it come to pass, that, when it is come to pass, ye might believe.
 Peace. Untroubled heart. Unafraid. Rejoice. Believe.

Those are all things that I wish I had a better handle on in my life, and I've had to learn (the hard way, of course) that I can't gain all those things on my own. I need others to help me through, and if I have faith in God, He will give me peace and the wisdom and strength to be braver than I was yesterday.

Oh Me...

I am now living in Utah, determined to actually get a life.
I love my family and everything, but I need to grow up at some point and I figured that twenty years old was probably as good an age as any. Yes, I, Christine Elizabeth Casper, weirdo, Whovian, Potterhead, Ringer, avid fan of good books and food, am twenty years old. That's two decades under my belt, folks. So what's it like to be twenty? No different than being eighteen. But I'm much different that I was two years ago.
Two years ago I lead a sad and numb existence. On paper, nothing should have been wrong with me: I have a family that loves me, I go to church each Sunday, I graduated in the top 20% of my high school class, I had a really good job, a scholarship to college... So why was I so empty?
Many people would likely find the actual reasons for my "condition" to be all in my head or not real, but suppose, for a moment, that things like depression truly could alter the way you participate in life and keep you from seeing how good you really are. You see, that's the whole problem: when you are in the thick of your battle with this, or any mental imbalance, you see yourself as this grotesque creature who ruins everything they touch.
This, my friends is what depression looks like:

Wait, what? That's right: funny man Jim Carrey suffers from depression, showing that depression is usually present in the most unexpected people.

It's also a fairly common mental imbalance- there are millions of Americans medicated for depression every single year. It's really nothing to be ashamed of. There are different types of depression, the kind that I have has to do with a lack of a chemical called serotonin in my brain. This likely comes from events or habits formed throughout life that cause you to feel like you're never good enough and that you don't deserve any form of happiness; the list does go on from there. My type of depression has lasted longer than two weeks and is therefore labeled as "clinical depression."

Why am I saying any of this? It's all very curious, I know. One of my hopes is that one day people will feel comfortable enough with issues such as depression to talk about them more openly. There are so many people in this world that would get help if they only knew that they weren't alone. I felt alone. I felt like I had to be one of the unlucky few who had this "disease" and that I could be cured some day. The truth is that I will never be cured of my depression, I am just learning how to control it better. It's not a disease either. Cancer is a disease, lymphoma is a disease. Asperger's syndrome is not a disease, obsessive compulsive disorders are not diseases, these are mental disorders.

So are you handicapped if you suffer from a mental disorder? In some senses, yes. But not in ways that the general public considers handicaps. Happiness is a choice, right? Yes and no. When you have a mental disorder it's difficult to convince yourself that you are deserving of one thing or another; for me, this was happiness and love. 

I would try and try on a daily basis to be more happy... to be happy like everyone else around me. I tried to copy others, to no avail. Through this past year I have learned that your happiness is never the same as someone else's happiness. I had to work through my issues to figure out what the hell made me happy and ways to recognize that happiness. Now I have a better handle on all that stuff and am ready to "face the world" again. I was never hospitalized or anything of that nature, so no worries.

I can't tell you that I haven't had days where I don't want to try and be happy because I did something that I deserve to suffer for. I can't tell you that I haven't wanted to fall back into my old destructive habits, or even that didn't actually repeat some of them. Those would be lies. With everything that's difficult, you have to take it day by day and I have resolved to try my hardest to be better today than I was yesterday. I look to the future far more than I look into the present and while it's wonderful to have goals, it is equally as, if not more, important to experience the here and now. I am still learning how to do this. I'm socially awkward to begin with, so it's probably going to take a while for me to master that skill. I have gotten better though!

I don't like feeling as though my issues are something that need to be hidden from the world. Secrets create tension, in my experience. There are many people who know of my struggles but I just wanted to put it out there on the internet so that maybe I can help others come to terms with their issues and do what they need to do to work on them.

I've typed a lot. I will hopefully write more later.

Being Okay

It has been a terribly long time since I've updated this thing... I'm just very busy and life has not granted me with many opportunities to do things like this for at least the last six months.

Speaking of life: mine is very different than I thought it would be at them moment, and I've been thinking about how I used to think I would be preparing for some sort of study abroad at this point in time or something like that. But I'm not. I'm at home and I'm going to a community college. I've realized that there are many good things about stay home though: I get to go to my brother's football games and see my other brother march. It's much less expensive, the list gets more and more personal from there. I've also realized that it's okay to not be doing what many of the people my age are doing because I've never been one to do anything the normal way. Sure I get upset about not being at a college far from home, but then my brother sings a solo in church or I make one of my kids at Kid's Club's day, or the make mine and God reconfirms to me that this is where I'm meant to be. This is where things for me are going to fall into place.

I read all these things about people at college studying their butts off or partying it up with their friends in one form or another and like I said, I get a little sad. But that's okay because we all get a little sad over this or that sometimes.

More recently I was taken from the elementary school where I started Kid's Club at and put into a completely new school with completely different kids and rules. Basically I went from a pretty wealthy school to one of the poorest schools in the district and I'm not going to sugar coat it: I do not like it. Every day on my way to work at my new school, all I can think about are all the sweet little faces of the children at my first school. Even when I see the actual kids from my new school all I can think about is how much I miss the other kids. How much I miss my kids. God has made it blatantly obvious why I'm at this school but it doesn't hurt any less.

So what am I supposed to get out of this? I'm not sure yet, but I hope it's good because my heart is still completely broken. I know it's going to be okay, it's just hard and I just hate having to try to see the positives about all this. But what else can I do?

I come home tired and sad from work every night now. Just done with the day and with everything. I honestly believe that this is going to be one of those wounds that no amount of love from my new kids or new staff give me, can heal. Time is the only thing that will heal it and I've already gotten pretty good at taking it one day at a time. I know this is what it feels like to love somebody and have to let them go without a single say in the matter. It's funny but I would liken this to being broken up with. I hate this feeling. That's probably why I don't date... at all.

But these kids need me. They need me, they need my love, and they need my heart. The only problem is that my heart is stuck at Chandler Elementary School.

Time, could you please hurry up and make this hurt less!

That's all....

I Wanna Come Home

It has been an appreciably long time since I last decided I had something worth blogging about, so I figure this is a really good time to say something. I must warn you, I'm not entirely sure what I am going to write so I cannot promise a comprehensive structure for this blog.

First and foremost, there are twelve days until I begin the long and glorious journey back to my beloved state of Texas and more importantly, home. This past year in college has been nothing but a trial BUT I did get quite a bit more out of being at school than I thought I would. I am almost positive about what I would like my future to hold and I have made some pretty awesome friends. Now these friends aren't those that I feel I could tell my deepest darkest secrets to yet, but they are people who have enriched my life in one way or another. One friend in particular reminds me on almost a daily basis of my goals just because they are doing what I would like to do. This friend in question has also shown me that just because someone looks a certain way does not mean they will act a certain way. I bet you're thinking, "Wow, way to be vague there, Christine..." but I just feel like if I get into detail about who this person is, I will babble on and on about them and I would really like to move on.

I sprained my ankle and it looks pretty nasty. This happened last Tuesday when I decided that it was time for me to get into shape. Guess that's not happening for a while. Three good things have come of this mishap:

1) I do not have to take my P.E. final.

2) I do not have to take my tap dance final.

3) I have seen how kind people can be.

Point number three deserves to be expounded upon. Since I've been gimping around on crutches (not as awesome as they look), people have either been super nice or incredibly rude. Example: I was gimping back from seeing the school play last night and some chick was sitting smack dab in the middle of the ramp texting. She heard my crutches and looked up, but she did not move from the middle of the ramp and continued texting. I'm thinking, "What a jerk!" but then I thought of how sad her life is going to be when people don't want to be around her anymore because of how rude she is. I would say about 99% of the people at Snow College were very kind to me this past week, that little snot would be included in the reprehensible few who only think of themselves here in Ephraim, Utah.

Facebook has become more of a burden than anything else. There's only so much to do on there and it wastes my time like nothing else I'm involved in. I am constantly finding myself wondering why I'm on so much because it's a cesspool for teenagers to share their irrelevant and quite honestly, intelligible thoughts. I have come to really love Twitter, Tumblr, and YouTube because a good portion of the people I am "friends" with on facebook are not on those sights. I can't even begin to explain how I loathe opening up my facebook and seeing that Johnny is "chillin wit sum awsum bros" and Mary thinks that "Words can't even describe how [she] feels right now :/...". Being a person who uses incorrect grammar only in the case of making something funny or to prove a point, the first status bugs me. I'm pretty sure your mother taught you proper English (unless she didn't, in which case you should feel obligated to speak correctly). The second status ticks me off like no other thing on facebook does. I can honestly say that I feel stupid posting something about how sad I am because you know what? Most of the people I'm "friends" with do not need to know my every emotion. It is my strong, personal, belief that people who post sappy or sad statuses or tell all of their "friends" that they just wiped their butt are looking for attention. As for me, I prefer to keep my private life private.

I could likely go on and on about things that are on my mind, but then I would probably have to turn my blog into a novel and then send copies of it to all three of the people who actually read my entries. With that, I say "Good marrow, kind gentlefolk."

#facebookfast

I've been off of facebook for about seventeen hours and I'm okay...for the most part. I guess facebook is more or less of a time killer for me in a way that YouTube sometimes has trouble being. Twitter is well, twitter. All of these social networking sites are really awesome if you're a celebrity of some caliber but when you're a "normal" every day college kid (a.k.a. a peasant) they're just something to do to:

A) Kill time in between classes

B) Talk to people at home who probably would have otherwise forgotten about you

C) Waste time even when you're not in between classes.

While I recognize how much of a time suck facebook is, it's still quite entertaining. I've done what some might call a "facebook fast" at least two times before but only for about two weeks at a time. The thing that I do each time I'm on one of my "facebook fasts" is basically say as my status and in my profile somewhere that if anybody needs to contact me they can e-mail me and give me their number half hoping someone will actually want to talk to me despite my sudden inconvenience of not being on facebook. Alas, the weeks pass and not a single soul e-mails me anything.

Point? While in some cases social networking sites are wonderful for hermits and the generally socially awkward, they can also unleash the ugly trolls within people.

The definition of troll according to urbandictionary.com is "A person whose sole purpose in life is to seek out people to argue with on the internet over extremely trivial issues. Such arguments can happen on blogs, Facebook, Myspace and a host of others."

People are usually fake on the internet. They say things they wouldn't say in real life and all of the sudden befriend people who they said earlier that day that they would rather stab than talk to. Don't get me wrong, I love the internet- especially Google, Wikipedia, and YouTube, but I seriously doubt that all of the time we spend on the internet is valuable. I've looked at my tiny clock in the corner of my screen and thought "Yeah, I have enough time to get on facebook." and what seems like two minutes later I look up and realize it's been thirty! That is a problem.

I think this is the reason why I love classic movies as much as I do. You never caught Rita Hayworth checking her facebook in the middle of Gilda or Marlon Brando making a video response begging Stella to talk to him. That's because everything was much less complicated in the realm of social networking. In those days social networking liking consisted of corporate men exchanging business cards, not seeing if their business name was a trending topic on twitter.

Okay, okay, I need to get back to doing what I need to be doing, but I just thought I'd post something since I was in a blogging mood.

I've Got a Peacful, Easy Feeling

Although the above title isn't correct grammar (as I'm sure a lot of the phrases in my posts are not as well), it reminds me of some good things both cognizant and immediate.
That particular song is by none other than the band the Eagles, and while this means absolutely nothing to any of you, it means a lot to me. The Eagles were just one of the many groups my family and I would listen to while driving sometimes across the country to visit family or simply to go to Disneyland! Among this set list of artists were Tim McGraw, Kenny Chesney, Toby Keith, The Beatles, and Billy Joel. Just about every time I hear Tim McGraw's song "Somebody Must Be Prayin' for Me" or Kenny Chesney's "That's Why I'm Here" they bring back memories of driving through the mountains of Colorado and yelling until we reached the end of a tunnel and sneaking breaths so that I could last the longest.
I miss those days now that I realize that my life will never be the same. I'm an adult in college and living on my own. Without my parents. Without my brothers. It makes me really sad to think about how much I miss at home not being there for my brother Grant's first school football game or my brother Garrett's first audition for the high school musical. And at the same time, it makes me incredibly thankful for all that my family is blessed with.
I will admit that for a long time I was far from the perfect child. I would tell my mom that I was going to call CPS every time I didn't get my way and would subsequently get spanked- for being too smart, I think. I do think I made a very decent effort to appreciate my parents in my last few years at home. I just wish that I could fly home for the small things like auditions and football game but unlike my roommates, I don't live two hours away which probably for the best. I have to be resourceful and ask for things that I can't get from my parents from other people. I have to keep track of my own busy schedule and be on time to church. I also have to decide whether or not I want to go to church (I go mom, don't worry.)
I guess all I really want right now is to take a road trip with my family to California, singing "Get Over It" by the Eagles and praying that the CD doesn't skip on "Love Will Keep Us Alive" or "The Girl From Yesterday."
But for now, I've got a peaceful, easy feeling about the way things are.

Something's Gotta Give

Can I just say that frustration sometimes rules me life? Okay, so there it is. And it does.
I'm currently far from home and have been for quite some time and it's been pretty great; well, it's been pretty great for the most part. There are people both at home and in my present situation who simply tick me off.
For example: There are certain people in my general vicinity whom have every opportunity in the universe to choose to do the right thing and they choose the wrong thing simply because it seems much less complicated. I have seen all sorts of scantily clad young adults strewn about the campus. I'm almost certain that they know better, and that is what bothers me the most. Another taunting occurrence in my location is the prospect of young men who should be focusing on a completely different task than the task with which they have decided to concern their time with. You see, in my church young men are strongly encouraged to serve a church mission at the age of nineteen. I go to a junior college where the young men are either nineteen, home from their church mission, or simply eighty-sixing the whole "mission thing." I hesitate to become too incredibly interested in anybody at my school simply because they don't interest me. At the same time, I don't want to be the only girl in my apartment not going to a dance. That's what happened to me in high school and I guess I fooled myself into believing that college was going to be any different. It's all so superfluous that I don't know why I'm even writing about it.
Now back home there are people who simply send me reeling and not in a good way. I do not understand how certain people can still enrage me when we're so far apart. I likely have facebook and texting to blame for those things. I cannot stand fake people who get everything they wish for and things they do not deserve. I do the best I can with the prospects I have and still seem to come up short socially. I've never been to a school dance of any sort. I've never been asked on a date because somebody actually liked me as more than a friend. I'm often alone when I don't want to be.
It's just frustrating. Many things are frustrating. I think the most frustrating thing about humanity is it's love for blatant stupidity. I wish that people in general would just get a clue and come to realize that the world sure as heck doesn't revolve around their sorry rear-ends and it will not at any point in the near future. It can be difficult to look around and not like what you see; what I see is that I'm apparently the only one trying my hardest every day to be the best human being I can be. Yes I falter and make mistakes, but I don't let them define the rest of my life. They simply aide in my progression toward perfection. I just want people to make good decision and to not be fake. It would appear that I am asking too much.