I cannot tell a lie.

(Well, actually, I can, but I'm choosing to be like dear little Georgie Washington, and own up to my error.)

Every Sunday afternoon and evening, I feel a creeping dread that slowly grows as the sun dips lower in the sky and the comfortable grogginess of my afternoon nap wears off. It's the creeping dread of Monday. I have been doing a pretty good job managing the graduate school dread which terrorized my life during the fall semester. However, I don't think that this management has come about by a change in the circumstances of graduate school, rather, I believe that it has come from change in my attitude which God was so gracious as to alter.

He has allowed me to see the bigger picture of what I'm working towards. He has altered my view of correction, and made me more amenable to constant scrutiny and criticism. The work load is becoming more typical, and fortunately God made us adaptable beings.

But that doesn't mean that every Sunday evening (and to a smaller degree, each evening of the week until Friday) that I'm not gripped by a dull dread of tomorrow. I don't like it. Sometimes I even hate it. It's a hard thing to hate your profession, your life, and what you're training to do.

But there are several things on which I meditate when it seems as though Monday may be the blackest day ever made:

1. I am pursuing a profession that is not about me- it is about serving other people. There is incredible gratification in a "helping profession."

2. God has not given me more than I can handle, and His work in me is being perfected during this time in my life.

3. I have rarely found anything hard or difficult. It is good for me to develop perseverance as I continue in this program.

4. This week will end. And each week that ends brings me closer to that day when I can sign my name, "Courtney Blake, M.S., CCC-SLP" and collect a paycheck like an adult.

Some days, that's all that gets me through...

:)