Kamikaze Cockroach

Today I am a believer in signs.

I do not do well with roaches. They completely creep me out. I get the heebie jeebies just thinking about them. This morning as I was getting in the shower, I saw a big, ugly, obviously mean-spirited roach crawl across the wall of the bathroom. I was already partly in the shower, and therefore wet at this point, so there wasn't really a whole lot I could do about it without dripping all over the bathroom, so I just decided to go ahead and finish my shower, and then deal with the problem later. The silly roach completely ruined my shower experience though because naturally I was worried that it was going to crawl into the shower and eat me the whole time.

Thankfully, I finished my shower uneaten, so I got out and began to look around for the roach so I could kill it, but I didn't see it anywhere. If there's anything worse than seeing a roach, it's knowing a roach is there, but not seeing it. Completely ill at ease at this point, I decided the best thing to do would be just finish getting ready, so I leaned over the toilet to get something out of the cabinet above it and just happened to look down. Low and behold, the pesky roach was floating belly up in the toilet bowl. All I had to do was flush.

Since today is the day of my worst final this semester and I've been worrying about it all week, I've decided that the roach is a sign, and maybe today won't be so terrible after all.

Home

I started this post the other day and never finished it. However, I just spent all afternoon working on a project that involves manually putting 20 years of daily soil temperature data into a spreadsheet, and I'm pretty sure if I spend one more second working on it today I'll explode. Seemed like a good time to take a break and finish my post.

I'm in this weird stage of life where I have a house with parents and sisters, but I'm not there most of the time, so it's not exactly "home" anymore, or at least not in the same sense of the word as before. I also have a place to stay at school with my school "family", where I do spend most of my time, but it's not really "home" either because I know I won't be here for much longer. So when I think of the word home, I don't automatically see images of a particular place or particular people. Instead when I think "home" I think of feeling completely relaxed, of being absolutely comfortable, of being at absolute peace with myself and the world around me.

I recently came across this verse in John 15: "I've loved you the way my Father has loved me. Make yourselves at home in my love." Other versions say to remain or abide in my love, and while it means the same thing, something about putting the word "home" in it makes me see it in a whole new light. It brings all those feelings of comfort and peace with who I am and where I am to mind, and it speaks volumes to me of who my Savior is. While He is all powerful and has every right to do anything He wants with us, He's not some ruthless, hard hearted slave driver, constantly ordering us around with no regard for our well being. Instead, He wants us to make a home in His love. To be so comfortable there that we'd rather be there than anywhere else.

Some friends of mine lost almost everything in an apartment fire yesterday, and that got me to thinking about home again. If what we consider home is where we keep all of our stuff, that can all be taken away in an instant. However, if we consider Jesus's love for us our home, then it can never been taken away. His love is constant, never changing, never ending. It can't be stopped by a fire or a flood or anything else that can so easily destroy our worldly dwellings. If that isn't comfort and peace, or my definition of home, then I don't know what is.