breakfast, coffee, walks, and tragedy.

There are a few things that I especially love to do with my close friends: going out for breakfast, going out for coffee and quality conversation and taking long walks, especially semi-late at night, even if it is really cold. I have a few friends that I share breakfast with on a semi-regular basis and its splendid. I've gotten to do all three things in the last few days and it warms my heart. I had breakfast with some amazing women this morning, for example, at 3rd coast which is quickly becoming a favorite place (I've been there 3 times in the last week and a half). I also had an early thanksgiving dinner today and Maureen and Abbie's. I always come away from their house amazingly blessed, I can't even explain it except to say that within the walls of that apartment the love of Jesus is experienced in a way that I have yet to experience elsewhere. Tonight I got the double blessing of riding home with new friends, Jeremy and Julia, precious people. I hope I get to spend time with them again sometime at least semi-soon.

I just got some hard news from my mom about people who are, in many ways, closer than family to me in Portugal: my "aunts" and "uncles" during my five years there with relational threads that run deep and will continue through the rest of my life. I won't go into detail but I feel as though my world has been shaken. Its a strange sensation because I'm now so far removed from it all being here in college but at the same time still feel so deeply, intimately connected to it. I feel as though the roots I put down there, the roots I still, to some degree, feel like I have there are in completely different soil now than when I left. I'm not sure what to do with that reality. Part of me mourns the loss of it all and part of me just wants to shrug and say that's life and I have a hard time reconciling the two. I guess that this is just the beginning. The whole process is only going to continue and get more complicated as I get older. Times and realizations like these make me all the more glad that there is more to life than what my eyes can see or my heart can feel.