figure 1. a stack of books in the arrangement left by my dad 21 years ago

i love seeing stuff like this and being reminded that God paved the road before me. He, in His sovereignty, blessed my mom with a husband who knew what would happen to his life, who wanted to deal with it in a godly manner, who loved his future child, and loved her. does it get any better than this? <3

today was intense. but as of 5:30pm, 3 out of the 4 big things i had to do this week are now done!

marsh lab practical: check

neurobio midterm: check

poster submission: check

classics midterm: uh…

so there is much reading to be done tonight, but God is still good. His goodness is shown in his burden-lifting abilities <3. after i came home today, i was feeling particularly drained since i am in a severe sleep deficit and the stress of everything else has not been helpful. also, i feel like i’ve been missing a lot of people lately. i think it’s the hermit-like lifestyle i’ve been living for the past week. but God – He reminded me of how i am so NOT alone, how He has been blessing me this week, and He totally made me feel relieved and joyful. a joyful heart is good medicine, yo.

tonight, i think i finally put my finger on what is holding me back from putting my full trust in God. i think i have this fear in me that causes me to not want something so much for fear of being heartbroken if it’s not God’s will. and the funny thing is, God taught me something real from stuffchristianslike.net about how i view Him. the guy wrote a post about how christians think that God will give us the opposite of what we want if we give our lives completely to Him, and although it is a really funny post, at the end he speaks some truth about what it says when we think that way. if that’s how we view God, then we’re serving a pretty mean God – and i just had a moment of realizing that my not-wanting-something-for-fear-of-it-being-taken-away is stemmed from my view of God and my lack of trust in His goodness. so today, God opened my eyes to this. and i am thankful. :] yay.

i thought this class would be different.

i was so excited when i heard that we were going to be learning about these “theories” about God and free will.

i was so passionate about taking notes in class, which turned into my personal commentary on the professor’s lecture.

and i was so disappointed when i found out that all our grade relies on is our ability to regurgitate the information given to us in class. i wanted to use my brain.

so in the class, he talks about the existence of God and the existence of evil in the world, and the argument of how there could be evil in the world if there “were” a benevolent and omniscient God who created it. then there’s this theory of why God chose to create free will. and it has been good for me to be in the class, even though i get all worked up in my mind about why he’s explaining things wrong. but now we’re on to the idea of fairness.

soak that word up.

and how fairness is supposedly an objection to the “idea” of the existence of God because it is not fair that some people suffer more in their lives than others. and he goes on to elaborate about why there is so much undeserved pain and suffering in the world. but somehow the professor dupes the whole class (or maybe almost the whole class) into assuming that we all deserve lives without suffering. and that this whole fairness thing is right. and that the world should be fair and just if God is fair and just. well, you know what, professor? God is more than fair and just. grace is not fair nor just. the gospel is not fair in any way.

so, thank you God for the grace that you give us. You are good, even if our world is fallen.

it is quite entertaining to watch the spark of joy in their eyes when they find that washing their hands results in bubbles (it’s like magic!) and so cute because they think that the soapiness down there is still good for further hand washing use.

randomflash. i dreamed that i was eating garlic last night, and i know why. it was because my fingers smelled like garlic. and the garlic pieces in my dream were part of a delicious meal that i didn’t even get to eat because i woke up… great.

it doesn’t happen very often.

but every time… i don’t get an answer from you, but instead an excuse.

it’s okay, i understand. and i tell you that it’s okay.

but i’m tired too, and i have a lot of things on my plate, too… but i do my part.

and i just wanted to ask you to do yours, too.

it’s hard for me. like that one time i asked you to line the trashcan before throwing trash in it. you looked at me like i had crazy in my eyes. it kind of hurt.

and to me, the act of asking you is helping me turn away from holding onto my frustration and not cleaning up just for the sake of my mental health. because some days i really feel like i could go insane. instead of vacuuming, scrubbing sinks, sweeping, throwing away food, and bringing dirty dishes to the sink as my service to God, it turns into my solution for my frustration.

and that is not the solution.

it’s not living in a manner worthy of the gospel. it’s me getting stuck in the same black hole of sin. it’s during these times that God reminds me of 1 Corinthians 10:31.

Whether, then, you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.

wow. humbling. it’s humbling to know that God in his infinite might, reached down to touch me, Priscilla Gee, and place the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ on me.

and yet, i do not have the decency to impart this grace on the people around me whom i love.

not my personal interests, but also the interests of others. of hers. <3 Philippians 2 die selfishness!

8amfinal.physicslab.physicsdiscussion.lunch<3.research.crammingmadness.freshwaterfinal.epic<3.homework.

and the night goes on, thanks to a spanish test tomorrow morning and unfinished physics homework.

today is definitely a philippians 4:13 day.

I can do all things through Him who strengthens me. it’s a head-lifter. He’s a head-lifter.

so i had lunch with my mom today, and that was really nice. and she went back to work for a while and i was sitting in the lunch room by myself so i sang Part of your World as a form of self-entertainment a few times, which was a fun way to pass the time, but apparently people can hear you outside, which i was informed of upon my mom’s return… and there was a lecture in one of the conference rooms next door… woops.

mosquito freakout moment #9837265836: so to transfer the mosquitoes from their cages to the experimental setup/enclosure, we have to knock them out temporarily in order to move them in, and usually i freeze them for 30 seconds, dump them in, close it, and they wake up and fly towards the scents. the first 10 times i did this, i would always be shaking, and i think i had an unhealthy amount of adrenaline running through my body. thus, i would fumble and be inefficient, accounting for the other 9837265835 freakout moments. (passed out mosquitoes are like ticking time bombs, they can wake up at any moment and start flying around… looking for bloodmeals. aka… your blood.) so i am now comfortable with the freezing method, but my PI suggested that refrigerating them would be a better idea, even if we refrigerated them for longer, they would be less knocked out, so we would have a lower percentage of deaths.  so i refrigerated them for a good 2 minutes, shook the container around to make sure they were totally out, and bring them over to the setup, open up the cage and start dumping them in. they weren’t very knocked out, because about 20 of them woke up and started flying around, so i frantically cover both the experimental unit and the cage, and look up in despair to see about 10 of them flying around the lab. great. just great. thankfully, after putting them in there, i was finished for the day, but my mosquito panick-attack recurrence was muy traumatizing.

and despite the irony of my bug-hater self working in a mosquito lab, i feel like in the midst of my panic and disgust during research, God has shown me a lot of His glory. mosquitoes are very complex organisms – especially with their crazy olfactory senses, and to think that people have been doing research for decades on a single species alone, yet we are so far from fully understanding how they work, really goes to show just how mighty our God is. and the fact that mankind cannot fully comprehend this little organism, and not only for anopheles gambiae, but pretty much for every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, really points to the power of God. it is so humbling to find out how complex creation is, especially because we take it for granted most of the time. bugs that we thoughtlessly smash are packed with God’s power. He is truly awesome.

sounds so mushy. but i love that song. and it has nothing to do with what i’m going to write. so don’t be fooled.

so i just wrote out a list of goals for this summer. they’re my house goals, not overall goals. it gets me kind of excited, but at the same time, the list is exceedingly long. we’ll see how far i get, seeing as i don’t have a clear picture of what my summer will look like yet. the thing i’m most excited to do on the list is to reorganize the south side of the garage (i feel weird labelling it as the south side, but… it’s true.). during winter break, i finally finished my goal to clean the north side of the garage, and it was a great feeling of accomplishment, but at the same time i found out how much work it was. i started it during the summer, and i would say that it took about 10 cleaning sessions to finally clean out that half of the garage. (we only had one car before, so one side of the garage was crazy unorganized storage… “storage.”) i almost lost my sanity on the last day of cleaning.

but that day was fun… kind of. i remember that my mom had gone out to a funeral that day, and i was home by myself, the weather was kind of gloomy and rainy, and i started at 10am and ended at 4pm. no breaks. that’s why i almost lost it. haha. also, there were a lot of spiders. i had to figure out what to do with a huge pile of gardening stuff, seeds that my mom had dried and wanted to plant later, and under it all… there were many spiders waiting to surprise me. i was tough enough to kill the daddy long legs, and after a while it became an instinctive move… but when i saw the first fat spider, fear overtook me. you know what i’m talking about, right? the fat ones – large abdomen, meaty legs. anyway, if my mom were there i would have screamed and asked for help, but unfortunately she was in whittier. so i had to deal. and instead of killing it, i felt like it would be really cool to catch it and show her when she came home, so i kept my eye on it and at the same time looked for some method of catching it. my method of choice: a vase and a newspaper advertisement. (it’s officially called the cup method, since you usually use a cup and a piece of paper. i’m sure you know of it.) and after panicking because i didn’t want to get close to it, silently of course as not to disturb my neighbors, and then panicking more because i didn’t know how to store it after i caught it, i found a waterbottle and transferred the fatty spider from the vase to the waterbottle. and closed it super tight. by the way, spiders are smart because when they’re captured, they always climb up. for me, their upward climbing was fear-inducing to the max. but catching a spider in a bottle felt like a big accomplishment for some reason. by the end of the day, i caught 4 total… i think they were a family.

anyway, so that was one big thing i remember from that day. pride from successful spider-catching. how sad.

the second best part of the day was the industrial steel shelving assembly! (the spiders were NOT the best part of the day. so not. they were a random thought.) i know that i looked like a complete n00b for most of the time and it got kind of loud since i dropped the poles a few times, but all of the sweat and tears were worth it. okay, not tears… but sweat. haha. i never knew a five tier steel shelf could look so beautiful.

okay, now for the best part of the day. after putting everything onto the shelf and as i was sweeping up, a car pulls up to the driveway and i looked up to see my mom’s mouth open in awe. it was an extremely happy moment, and it really made all of the dust in my face, dead spiders, live spiders, sweeping, and sweat all worth it.

i  never thought that honoring my mom could look like that… cleaning the garage? come on. when i think of honor, i think of respect, obedience, and flowers, even. i think service might have been in my list, but it kind of got lost, and it didn’t click until the very last moment. i don’t know why but my mental image of honoring God and people is confined to nice, clean, respectable things, when really it should be every possible way of honor. even doing the dirty work. it’s right.

Ephesians 6 <3.