Monday, April 21, 2008

Life Change

I played in the rain this morning. Though it did bother me a little bit that cars were driving by and probably thinking I was crazy, the first rain of spring just needs to be enjoyed! Everything is turning green and little friends are starting to emerge, which is something we encourage. Rachel and I had left two garbage bags on the front porch of the house two days ago to be taken to the dumpster when the craziness of wedding festivities passed. Yesterday when I thought to take them a squirrel scampered away from one of them. He had smelled nuts, apparently, and had made a tiny hold and discovered a small bag of trail mix. He was neatly removing the nuts from the bag so I decided to leave everything alone for a while longer. Today I went back to see that all of the nuts and the chocolate (a squirrel after my own heart) were gone but the Craisins were left behind. Obviously the little guy isn't a fruit eater. I love spring!!!

For lunch I met with Nicole, an Air Force recruiter, and it was awesome! This is one of the "developments" I've mentioned in previous blog posts. I'm enlisting! You may be wondering why. I desperately want to go back to grad school for nurse midwife and nurse practitioner licenses. However, the online program I'm looking at is quite expensive. While praying one day about how I would pay for this, I got a call from Nicole. I've talked with her before about Air Force nursing, but what sold me this time was that they pay for well over half of the cost of graduate school! And nurses only need to enlist for 3 years... which is as long as it will take me to get two degrees anyway. To top it off, I will most likely be stationed in San Antonio, where there is a very large NICU and flight nursing team. San Antonio is where my sister-in-law's family lives, and I LOVE them all. There are whole lists of other wonderful parts about being in the Air Force, and getting all of my questions answered today just further confirmed that this is from God and the right path. Though it is sad to think that it will be at least three years before I will even be able to think about going back overseas for longer than 2 or 3 weeks at a time, at the end of this three years I will be much more prepared to work independently in a third world country. Until then, I will live vicariously through and pray for all of the people I know who are serving God so beautifully in the places where I wish I could be. Basic training will start for me in January. It won't be as intense as civilian basic, since I will go in as an officer. Honestly though, I hope it is somewhat intense because I think it will be fun. How cool is it to get paid to run?!? Maybe there will be a little more to it then that, but I'm pumped.

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