sooooo drained....

Can I just say that the world caught up with me and dumped its entire contents in my lap today?

Can I complain a little about the fact that I'm 6 1/2 months pregnant and still look bascially like I have a beer belly?

Oh, how about this: my laundry smells sour because the dryer I use doesn't work well and so I have to leave them half dry and I overdid it last time without the benefit of a dryer sheet.

Yikes. I just feel so overwhelmed. I gave a lesson in church today about a really ugly subject matter: pornography. The hardest part was that I suddenly realized that this is a subject that is probably going to follow me around for the rest of my life, so I better get comfortable with it. You know when you have the sudden dawning insight that your mission in life is one that you would never have thought or chosen but somehow is strangely appropriate and oddly comfortable? Well there it is. One of my missions in life: to educate people about how to help those who struggle with pornography, or the loved ones of those who have difficulties.

Thank God that we don't go through pain for nothing.... but there is an entirely different kind of pain that we experience when we really reach out and help those around us. And it's something we can't avoid if we're really doing our best to be God's instruments.

What a sensitive, wimpy soul I feel I have sometimes. And yet sometimes i know I'm strong.

In the aftermath of that lesson, however, I didn't want to go to work and face 18 anorexic and bulimic women with severe depressive problems and tragic backgrounds. I wanted to curl up in a ball and sleep away the day. But here I am. All the girls are in bed. I check them every half hour... and it's oddly reminiscent of when I checked every half hour on my newborn daughter for the first week or so after her birth, terrified I would find that she'd stopped breathing.

Sometimes I venture into one of the girls' rooms and pause for a minute or so until I can see the reassuring rise and fall of a quilt cover.

The girl we keep out here... the one we just discovered with tons of contraband pills...
she's snoring. So I know she's OK.

My daughter is warm and safe in her bed, without me to check on her... and my husband, alone in his.

It's gonna be a long night.