Embracing 40: Year 3

Oh boy... I am now well passed the middle of the first half of my 5th decade of life. It is that time of year again, where I look at the goals I set three years ago and assess my progress.

1. Learn to play the piano. My daughter and I continue to learn together. I frantically plunk out the piece and then provide her with pointers when she is stuck. Thankfully, your Daddy learned piano in his youth, thus can assist us when we are both befuddled. (Score: 1)

2. Learn to read and write either Hindi or Urdu. I do not want to even talk about this... Ha, ha... Sadly I have very little motivation to learn how to read the language, especially since we are surrounded by English in prairie southwest. I need to remind myself to even speak Hindi to you two children! Slightly depressing... (Score: 0)

3. Travel the world with you two kids and your Daddy. I have a dream date set: 2020. I originally envisioned taking off a semester to travel. But since our finances are not as promising for such a venture, it looks like we will attempt a trip from June to August instead of September to January as we hoped. It just means we will be melting in some of the destinations we hope to visit. I believe bottle water will become a crucial necessity on our trip. ;) (Score: 0.5)

4. Explore the arts through painting, photography and writing. Ugh. No time. What happened...? (Score: 0)

5. Accomplish a challenging physical feat.This last year has been quite difficult in establishing any regular exercise routine, let alone accomplishing a challenging physical feat. (Score: 0)

6. Read the whole Bible, one more time. Yay! I accomplished something!!! I finally finished reading the Bible in two years as opposed to one. (Score: 1)

7. Re-establish my teaching career. This area has proven to be way more complicated than I thought. I am ready and willing to teach, if I find a ideal part-time position to tackle. But, such opportunities are lacking, as I am limited by the number of high schools in this town. (We have one high school here.) And our school division prefers to hire full-time. Sometimes I wondering if I need to find something else to do. In the meanwhile, I substitute teach. (Score: 0.5)

So, it seems like this year was a failure, with a score of 3/7.

However, I helped bring over a Syrian Refugee Family. And I am currently working with a dedicated team in order to resettle them. (Score: 4)

7/7 = 100%

I'm enough, with God's grace.

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