Ordinary.

I felt like a real human being tonight.  Wanna know why?

I wore jeans for the first time in THREE MONTHS! Ahhhhhhhhh!  It felt so good.  I never thought I would hear myself say that, but it felt so good to wear real pants.  An ordinary thing that just had new life to me.  Other new clothing items I wore shall remain nameless.

In other news, I have no idea how I happened to start going to bed so late... it just snuck up on me.  It probably has something to do with the fact that I haven't had to get up early in quite some time, and when I finally snuggle into bed and start thinking about my day, it's pretty late.  Tonight's even later because I just got back from a Superbowl party at my church.  It was lots of fun, and not just because the food was amazing.  (I really do love food.)   The game was fun to watch... (I never really liked football until this past year.  I watched the Greenbay vs. Chicago game in the fall with my dear friend JWo, and I just started liking it.  Pretty sure Chicago won that game.  Pretty sure I am the worst kind of football fan ever.  Whoever wins...I like them.  That's pretty awful of me, huh.)

But it was also fun to meet new people, and have good conversations.  One of the things in my life that I have always enjoyed is meeting new people.  Everyone is different when it comes to this, but I think that even that in and of itself is really a good thing.  I really appreciate people who are reserved and quiet, and I appreciate people who are outgoing and talkative, and I appreciate people in between.  I think we need all of the above. 

One of the highlights of the night was getting to talk to someone who had made a commitment this year to spending more time serving the poor in his community.  It was so cool to hear how God has been teaching him what it means to rub shoulders with people who live in poverty.  He shared about how he has been learning so much from the people that he has been able to share meals with, and how humbling it was for him to be able to have great conversations with people who live with next to nothing.  And then, yesterday, the students at Marquette University in Milwaukee (where I was volunteering with InterVarsity), held an urban project for their community.  60 students handed out 120 meals to people in their community that needed them, and I think that they realized that so many of the people that they were eating with weren't that different than them. 

I just think it's so cool that this was such a theme in the weekend, amidst so many different things; that God is teaching myself and others what it means to serve.  To value what our society has deemed invaluable.  To view people as Jesus views them.  I so look forward to being able to brush shoulders with the people around me that Jesus highly values, and I'm so thankful that I have been able to do that in the past months.  I know I've posted a lot of C.S. Lewis quotes (I just really connect with him...), but he once said that we need to:

"remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship."

I don't post this as though a reader might be hungry for fame or acknowledgment, or to suggest that you would want to worship another person, but to simply remind myself that:

"There are no ordinary people."