Coming to You Live from Fayetteville...

IT'S SATURDAY NIGHT!

My Saturday night location: big red couch in my living room

My Saturday night attire: sweats, t-shirt I spilled chocolate milk on, bare feet

My Saturday night activity: Listening to Taylor Swift. Reading. Blogging.

My Saturday night in one word: perfection.

After a busy week and a retreat last night, I am excited about doing nothing important tonight. I have a list of homework and Bible studies to prepare for the coming week, but it can wait until tomorrow.

First of all, in case you were wondering how my "no sweets for a week" challenge is going - it isn't. I lasted five days and then ate chocolate cheesecake, without regrets. I tied my record, so I didn't actually lose to myself! And I can live with that. Maybe I will try it again someday, but at the beginning of day five I was seriously considering a brownie for breakfast.

Homer is more entertaining than I thought! At least my translation of The Iliad in English is! For my Homeric Greek class, we are translating parts of The Iliad from Greek to English, but we are reading the whole thing in English. I never read it in high school, so the whole story is new to me. Most people seem to hate it, so I was dreading it, but then I started noticing some particularly wonderful phrases Stanley Lombardo uses, such as "pansy archers" and "desperate, womanizing pretty boy." Some of my other favorites in the first six books are:

• "As his soul seeped out into the sand." (to explain the death of Pandarus in Book 5, line 320) Perhaps it is slightly morbid, but there is something beautiful about describing it in this way.
• "Gods are to humans what humans are to crawling bugs." (Apollo warning Diomedes in 5.477-8) There is even some theological truth to that statement, I think.
• "Step right up for a quick end to your life." (Diomedes to Glaucus in 6.146) It sounds like he is promoting an unsuccessful game at the fair.

Considering there are 18 more books, you will probably be entertained by a few more excerpts from Homer's masterpiece. I think I will actually enjoy reading it... in English, anyway. Reading it in Greek is not so much reading as it is struggling to understand each word by itself; I have not completely mastered putting them together. Homer tends to break all of the grammar rules so that he can fit the words into dactylic hexameter. I don't know who he thought he was, forgetting augments and leaving off endings and changing typical conjugations!

I don't think any boys read my blog, but if you are a boy who has somehow stumbled upon my writing, first of all thank you for reading. Second, I suggest you skip through this next section, or at least proceed with caution. It might be a little awkward. I can let you know when it's okay to read again. I went shopping today. I am not a huge fan of shopping, especially when I am looking for something in particular. It gets even worse, though. I especially hate jeans shopping, purse shopping, and bra shopping. I rarely shop for purses, and when I do I never find anything I like, due to the fact that the majority of purses are bejewelled, bedazzled, be-alligator skinned... Anyway, that's not what I did today. I shopped for the other two items. Both on the same day.

This was the best jeans shopping I have ever experienced, though. The first pair I tried on fit perfectly - I love Levis! So that was accomplished quickly. Bra shopping, however, was worse. I walked to the lingerie section (Which is awkwardly across from the men's clothing in Kohl's - why?!? It should go in the far corner of the front of the store surrounded by more women's clothes and baby clothes, if you ask me.), and wasn't quite sure exactly what I was looking for. I never am. There were a multitude of bras of all sorts of colors - plain, patterned, "sexy"/scandalous. The problem? The majority of them all had little tags indicating "push up." Seriously, 90% of the bras I browsed through were push up bras. Now, that is not quite what I want. I just wanted a normal bra, and there were hardly any to be found! I finally found a non-push up bra on the clearance/discontinued bras rack that I decided would work, but I wonder if the fact that push up-style bras were a majority says something about our culture.

It bothered me. Hence, I hope to avoid bra shopping for a good amount of time.

Okay, random boys, you can join back in. Sorry about that.

This weekend at the Cru Women's Leadership Retreat, one of the things we talked about was prayer. We read the story of Jesus casting a demon out of a boy, and there were a lot of things in there that I had never noticed before that I wanted to share with you. If you need a refresher on the story, check out Mark 9:14-29.

1. So Jesus comes up and asks what the people are arguing about, and that is when the man approaches him about healing his son. Something I never noticed, though, is that he says that he asked the disciples to do so, and they couldn't cast the demon out. Why didn't the disciples ask Jesus for help, or even refer the man to Him instead of themselves? Why were they trying to do this on their own?
2. I love that Jesus takes the time to ask the father how long the boy had been like this - this small action shows me how much he cares to hear our side of the story, despite the fact that He is all-knowing.
3. I talked about this a couple of weeks ago, but I love the honesty of the man's prayer: "Lord, I believe - help my unbelief." That is something I want to constantly be admitting and praying.
4. My favorite thing about this passage is the very last verse. When the disciples ask Jesus why they couldn't cast the demon out, he replies: "This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer." Prayer isn't a last resort- it's the only resort. I want to have that attitude about so much more in my life; I want to go to God in prayer believing that is the way that He is going to work and move.

Hm. God is pretty wonderful.

And now, I am off to finish Fireseeds of Spiritual Awakening by Dan Hayes, as well as continue on with Paperdoll by Natalie Lloyd.