I am SOOOO tired. My goodness. The past two weeks have been pretty darn busy with Halloween, tests, and our first two dual meets of the season. This is not a picture from the dual meet, it's actually a picture from a state competition in high school, but nevertheless, it had swimming in it, so I put it up. :) We swam against Pacific first. They had about one third of the number of swimmers we had, so we kinda crushed them by over 100 points. :/ Poor guys... Then our second meet on the following day was against Linfield. Now Linfield normally is the toughest competition for our guys team because they usually have a larger number of fast swimmers on their team. This year, that was not the case. Both our men's and women's team beat them as well by around 100 points as well! I swam the 50 and the 100 free for both meets and anchored two of the relays which is always fun. Unfortunately though in my individual events, I didn't go quite as fast as I was hoping I would judging how fast I had been going in practices. But my coach assured me that now is the time when everyone is pretty much totally beat up and that I shouldn't worry about doing amazing right now. That was reassuring. I went like a 24.5 or something in the 50 which a B cut for Nationals is a 24.1 or something, so I'm really close to that. My goal by the end of this season though is to break a 24. (If I do this, my coach Gary said I can push him in the pool with all his clothes on. :) ) That's good motivation for me. hehe! My 100 time is about a second off of where it should be to be able to make the National's cut, so for every meet I'm gonna try really hard to make that more and more of a possibility. Who knows, if I don't make it to National's this year, I will know that it was for the best and that God didn't want me to go, but I'm not gonna lie, I want it real bad. So in the mean time, I'm just going to work as hard as I can at practice and have confidence in my training. That's about the best I can do for now as I wait and see what will result from it.

Linfield and Pacific are both in/around the Oregon region, so we had to ride on a charter bus for about 20 hours total this weekend. Not exactly ideal conditions for studying when everyone around you is talking, laughing, watching movies, playing games, etc. But this was the cool thing. I was actually able to study for a couple hours! Later after that study time I had called my mom and talked to her for a while and strangely enough, she said that her and my dad had felt an urgency to pray for me during that time that I would be focused and that I could study, and I did! It's so cool when I get to see little prayers like that answered. My parents have been a great testimony to me that there is so much power in prayer. Even for the little things in life, prayer can really change things. ("Where two or more are gathered, there I am as well." -this made me think of that verse. :)) So that was really cool to experience. The bus ride for the remainder of the trip was fun, we watched Gladiator-which suprisingly, I actually kind of liked in the end...the guy was just so admirable and honoring...I couldn't help but feel like some justice was served when he beats the crud out of the pansy/slimy emporer dude. It's so sad though that this kind of activity was a part of history though. Having people kill others as a form of entertainment and for others to enjoy is absolutely sickening. It's pretty rediculous how evil humanity can be. What a great paradox we are...we are capable of so much love and yet we are just as capable of being incredibly evil towards eachother and even to ourselves. Hmmm. God is so mysterious. Who can possibly fathom the depth of his grace for us? It is too great.

We watched many other movies that were fun, but much less thought-provoking. But anyways. That was the bulk of my weekend. I swam, I ate, I slept, I did some studying, and I rode on a bus. Ha! Leave it to God to give me purpose and meaning while I'm doing such ordinary and mundane things. These daily tasks that I do really would not be there if God hadn't provided them in the first place. So I might as well just do them the best I can and see if hopefully they will help serve His higher purpose later on. Welcome to life. :)

PS- This is a photo of the team on Halloween. It was a fun night. I am thankful for the different people on the team and the different perspectives that they bring to life. So many life stories to learn about... :)