Over the next week, I am checking out of Lexington and heading to various points in North Carolina with my family.  There has never been a better time for me to disappear from my current life and go on vacation, so you understand how absolutely thrilled I am about getting away for a week.  Actually, I’m already away from Lexington, as I come to you from Adolphus tonight.  As for the vacation itself, we will spend two nights in Greensboro, two nights in Havelock on the southeastern coast, and then a couple nights in who knows where in the southeast.  This is the beauty of the Osborne vacation:  yes, you know the general area in which you are traveling, but you have no idea where you will end up or what will happen.  Perhaps I will have some fun stories about our trip on the other side of the break, which will be about a week and a half from now.  Interesting though, at that point the summer will have less than a month left, and I cannot tell you how relieved I will be at that fact.

I spoke earlier how I feel this fall will be the first time since April 2007 that I am not spending the day hoping for a future time.  I have a goal though for the remainder of the summer, however, to spend that particular day attempting to make the most of every moment.  I will try, and it will be amazingly difficult to reverse this, to not be staring down August 18th will every fiber of my being.  I’ve been doing that for over a year, whether it was August 8th or December 22nd or May 2nd, and while the moments that were so anticipated often brought the satisfaction I sought, I feel empty now knowing I spent much of the last year breezing through and waiting for specific events in the often-distant future.

So what prompted this perhaps lofty goal?  Two things of note to be mentioned here:  my favorite author (yes) Erwin McManus has a new book out entitled Wide Awake, and it is inspiring me to think and live in the here and now the way that Chasing Daylight did back in my sophomore year.  And then there’s this song, the new Closing Song on Vintage CD 46, called “Miracle Of The Moment” by Steven Curtis Chapman.  I urge you to look up the song and soak in the lyrics, or just read Chasing Daylight because it’s pretty much the text translated into music.  In any case, I may have missed some opportunities this summer because of several unfortunate events which occured to derail my plans, but I figure submitting to God and figuring out that what has happened/is happening is according to His will, and living in every moment of the life goverened by Him is a pretty good idea.  That all said, I am still looking forward to August 18th and the kickoff of my swan song at UK, my One Shining Moment if you will.

To close here, I quote my boy Erwin from Wide Awake:  “It is very likely that the life God has given you as a gift today is the very thing he will ask of you as a sacrifice tomorrow.”

In the future, I wanna focus more on what I think about other things, not so much myself.  But typical me, I have been thinking a lot this summer about myself and the direction of my life and notsomuch other things going on around me.  Hopefully that will change on the other side of vacation, which I’m holding out will send me a giant boost of power which will help me surge and sizzle through the remainder of the summer.