So here I am home for spring break, spending time with Xenophon in the ancient and modern worlds, with Twilight and Kathelia and Ayudaren and The DM crafting a new world order, with my sister and her roommates enjoying the Pepperdine life (or at least the version of the Pepperdine life that visitors get to experience). This Saturday I will once more spend time in The Circle as Monica Jasmine, and I read old Honor Harrington novels and remember what it is to be a hero. The weather is unseasonably rainy but it means that the immortal hills of the Valley have donned their green mantles for me, and driving through Malibu Canyon or down Valley Circle I could not help but think, but I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed like one of these.

Here among proverbial lilies of the field I cannot help but think on how God pours life into my life. It is good to remember the family and its prophetic role in my life, and all that has come to me through it over the years. Driving around this place in Betsy I encounter memories on every street corner, mistakes and successes alike, and it is a good thing to remember the family there through it all, speaking God's truth and God's wisdom to me. It is easy to think, here among the lilies and the memories, that I have found a wellspring of life. To think that there is life to be had in my friends, or in the family, or in peace and rest and quiet. But that is not true, and will only make me sad when those things pass away or their place in my life changes, as inevitably must happen. Life may flow through those things for a season of time, but it always flows from Jesus. Sometimes it seems unconscious, as with Princess or Thea, and sometimes it's deliberate, as with Blue Rose or Esther Selene. The scenery changes, and the cast changes; the life that Jesus has for you means different things at different times. But Jesus remains, and the fact that he has life for you, and I think that is what makes the passage of time bearable.