Now Playing: Andrew Peterson, "After the Last Tear Falls."

My alarm woke me out of a deep, dream-filled sleep, like shooting up through dark water past iridescences. At nine o’clock I went to the FRC to meet Huhee. We worked on kitchen words today: I brought a bunch of utensils and dishes, and we worked on learning basic nouns and verbs.

Afterward, I sat in the car and finished chapter 5 of Burroughs. Sunshine slanting through the window kept my legs warm, though a frigid north wind was scouring out of a scraped-clean powder blue sky. I asked myself why I’m not happy and realized that I may not have the “freedom” I think I want, but I’m not using a basic freedom I actually do have—the freedom to rejoice in Jesus Christ.

At half ten, I drove to Crepe Myrtle for work. Today was steady again, busier than yesterday—at one point nearly every available seat was taken. I took a big table at first, and when they paid one of the receipts didn’t print, so after the lunch rush, Laurel told me that it looked as though one of the people hadn’t paid. If someone doesn’t pay, I have to pay, so I was cleaning, trying not to be too distressed, when she told me that she had found the missing transaction after all. I need to be objective, but I find that I'm even more sensitive at work to people's likes and dislikes. I want to make it all perfect, to be the best, smoothest server--of course. No room for grace in my world....

I finished cleaning early, before three o’clock, and went home. Moochy trotted up to the gate to watch me pull into the driveway the way she always does. Clutching my bag and pots and pans on one arm, I checked the box for post and found an envelope with the ETS stamp. My legs started to shake. I set everything down at my feet and ripped open the envelope, cold fingers fumbling with the folds. At first I stared at it, unable to believe what I was seeing. Far better than even the good score I’d gotten on the practice exam. I was too numb to do anything but tremble. God provides, God provides, God provides. I don’t understand why He keeps providing in my dumb, beast-like way (Psalm 73), but He holds my hand.

Amy had organized a surprise 21st birthday party for Catherine this evening (this evening over there, 3:30 p.m. here) and had invited me to come via Skype. So I settled down with half a bagel and my webcam in my room, afternoon sunshine slanting, dazzling, through the windows. So strong that it whited out the webcam at one point. The screen became a window into a wee room in Belfast, where a group of people (some of whom I knew, some of whom I didn't) were hiding in the dark, waiting for Catherine to arrive. Stephen had me practice "hiding", and Rosemary, Stephen, and Emmaline all informed me that I sounded very Northern Irish--! I watched the silhouettes moving around in the gloom and laughed.

Catherine finally did come, and we all shouted "Surprise!" and laughed at her appropriately surprised expression.... I sat by my laptop for most of the rest of the afternoon, watching the proceedings. Gareth had been trying to make me flinch by snapping party poppers in front of the camera, so I scared him by putting the guinea pig up to the webcam. Annie also made an appearance, albeit a squirming, disgusted one.

After my mother left, I sat and chatted with Gareth, with Naomi, with Daphne briefly. Faces poignantly vivid through the computer-generated haze. It was so, so strange to know myself to be present only as virtual reality to them--to know that I was a weird blue sheen in the corner to the people who didn't know me, and a reduced, two-dimensional version of myself even to the ones who do. I wonder if that's how Christ felt on earth, stripped of His divine glory (not to minimize His humanity; it's a bad analogy). And it was strange to have these people, so dear to me, transmuted into shadows, silhouettes, at best blurred portraits of themselves--photos of friends eerily aged, metamorphosed into Caravaggios.

Anyway, after a group of people left, the girls who were left played games. I was on Amy, Charlotte, and Rosemary's team. Then they took photos and managed to put the laptop in one of them so that I saw a digital photograph of all of them and a laptop in one corner, which was even weirder.

Then it was tea time.... Outside, the furious white blaze of afternoon through bare trees had dwindled to cobalt, still pure, still intense. All four of us were there for tea tonight, and afterward, we watched a Jeeves and Wooster episode. Annie jumped up on the stove and ate part of the casserole my mother had made! When I went upstairs, I had a missed call from Sarah, so I chatted with her on the phone for a bit.

After I talked to Sarah, I talked to Anna for awhile about random nonsense. Sat on the floor and read names of British birds to her, talked about Sutcliff and Churchill, about Latin and Greek, about her stories, the mess in her room, our families' very different approaches to going on holiday (her family plans almost nothing; mine plans everything). Then it was time for family worship, so I went downstairs.

After family worship, back upstairs again. Graduate school application submission time! I turned in eight applications tonight, all at once, plunging into deep water and paddling up to the surface breathless. Peter got on Skype. Now I'm sitting bleary-eyed, staring at the screen, listening to Andrew Peterson, Coldplay, and Tenth Avenue North.