Well, well, well. She has a gosh-darn blog.

This is a horrible idea.

I'm sitting on the floor of my dorm room, surrounded by piles of notes and articles on NATO and Bosnia, beginning a blog on the last day of the semester.

Procrastination? Just maybe.

But it was either that or stare aimlessly out the window for another fifteen minutes. I'm watching the snowflakes dance as they're buffeted by the wind, and contemplating just how serious I am about running today in the below-zero windchill. I'll go... in a few more minutes.

So instead of doing anything productive, I'm sitting here on the floor beginning a blog. I kind-of despise blogs, but I think the honest truth is that I'm enticed by them. I've always had a journal, and this typing thing is significantly faster than writing, as sad as that may be. I've promised to start a blog for the adventures soon to come, and we'll see how serious I actually am about maintaining it.

Ideally, I'd love to have this blog serve as a record of the doors God opens and the story he writes in my life as I begin to explore the world. I hope that anyone reading it is as amazed as I am by the ways God still works. It's Advent, after all, and we wait for Christ's return in a world of brittle, broken fragments. Come, Lord Jesus. Come and heal our broken world. And make us into people who see it with your eyes.

Because the really awesome reality of my life this semester has been just that. Over and over and over, God has said, "Look, Kelly. See that crack of light? Pay attention. Notice how it's getting bigger? Glimpse the world beyond it? I want you to run through that door. Go, Kelly. Knock, and I'll open it. Dare to enter into what I have for you." I don't always like hearing that, to be honest. It scares me, because I realize that my life is going to soon look significantly different. I'm spending a large part of 2010 alone, outside of the United States, and outside of my comfort zone. On the one hand, my story is wonderful; on the other hand, it is just one of many. I find great joy in that. God is doing stuff in our world, in the lives of other people, for whom life is just as exciting and complex and deep and real as it is for me. That blows my mind. And so I'm an open book, an empty slate, a blank page. And I'm curious to see what God writes.

"I run in the path of your commands, for you have set my heart free." Psalm 119:32.