Not Your Typical Bonsai Tree

I have decided to put the intellectual aspects of my literary encounters on hold for a pressing issue.  It's quite the literary emergency!  And I am being melodramatic, by the way!

Let me unpack this issue for you.  Today was an epic day:  my favorite author, Ted Dekker, released his third and final book for this year, Immanuel's Veins.  Now there seems to be nothing askew with this situation thus far, correct?  Well that would be so, were it not for the four or five other books that I am already reading!

As it is, admittedly, I am not adequately comprehending the materials I've been assigned for my classes this semester.  I strive to understand and retain what I read, but when I read a chapter of one and then a section of another, and then multiply the conflicting information by two or three times, I am at such a loss for recalling that information that I find myself rushing to the end of each piece of literature at all costs.

I wish you only knew my lack of management skills!  So many minds are full of compartments and storage bins and filing cabinets, and it is only a matter of how well people organize information into these systems.  But mine is full of doors and tunnels and stairwells.  What am I to do with a wealth of information?  I put them in piles against the wall in as orderly a way as possible, but it gets to be a bit frayed at points, and quite inefficient.  Do not get me wrong, though, I have come to realize that God gave me a mind to explore, to dive deeper into, and in which to lose myself.

So it is with quivering boldness, as it battles the reluctance it desires, that I announce my beginning of a new book tomorrow, Immanuel's Veins.  Each of Mr. Dekker's books speak to me in my mental residence, and it was said in Encounter Chapel today that "a teacher is going to teach you what's relevant with your life at that time."  Mr. Dekker is constantly teaching and challenging me.  I am going to strive to finish with excellence all my other materials, but I am going to burn out if I am not thoroughly intrigued along the way.

God's calling on my life is most likely waiting for me in the arenas that pique my interest, and I have mistakenly cut myself off from these things.  My greatest fear for God's will for my life is that I will be the bonsai tree in "A Work of Artifice," who "could have grown eighty feet tall," but was pruned away by reasoning and logic and all other things that wish to teach me how to successfully stand nine inches.  It may sound absurd for me, being a bonsai tree, to proclaim that I will one day stand eighty feet tall, but it is also probably absurd to begin reading a fiction book amidst the morass of my college assignments.

I am NOT your typical bonsai tree!  But that's okay.  I wasn't made to be... =~)