Love and Peace

Well, after a tumultuous fight with Hotmail for the last ten hours, I finally managed to get to my inbox and find a response from the agent who initially showed interest.  And...

She said it sounded fabulous and asked for the manuscript!

I then proceeded to bounce around the living room by myself like a spaz (my husband was at the gym).  And then I called my parents and bounced while on the phone.  And then Evan got home and we bounced some more.  My legs are tired.

So anyways, once Hotmail decides to quit being a punk, I'll get my manuscript emailed to her and then spend the next several weeks trying not to give myself an anxiety attack.  How?  Lots of kickboxing, writing, fellowship, and general staying-busy.  Not to mention that in the meantime, I still have to hear back from seven other agents who I queried along with this particular one.  (I got a rejection yesterday, no surprise, from an agent who I was timid about but decided to query anyways.)

I am blessed.  I am thankful.  I am excited.  I am humbled.  I pray that this might be the beginning of something for me.  I have done a lot of waiting (patiently and impatiently) since I graduated with my masters degree three years ago.  I always thought that I would immediately land a teaching job and then that would be my life track until retirement.  Seriously - I had it all planned out for the next 30 years.  Only, God has taken my plans and thrown them into oblivion.  I didn't get a job teaching, and I still haven't.  Sometimes I doubt that I ever will.  Instead, I've had a few odd jobs, grown a LOT through those jobs, met a lot of interesting characters and made a lot of friends, had a dream in which the book came to life, wrote down the dream and turned it into a book, and am now waiting to see where the book will lead me.  Once I quit griping about how things weren't going the way I had planned, I realized that things were going much, much better than I could have ever imagined.  God has a way of doing that, you know?  So, my pride rests not with myself and what I have done.  It rests with God and his unfailing promises to do what is best and what is good.  I try to no longer pray for what I want.  I pray for what He wants to do through me and with me.  His guidance is more important than my whims.  I can't wait to see where he guides me next.

With that, I wish you all love and peace.  Good night, dear ones.