Thankful

I tutor a PRECIOUS 6th grade girl at Landmark and she's great; I think we have more fun together than we are supposed to have. But that's one beautiful thing about 1-on-1. Once I feel out the work ethic and ability to joke but be serious at the snap of my fingers, I know that I can be fun and stupid with her and still get work done. Her biggest weakness is comprehension of abstract material so we obviously spend a lot of time working with that.

So anyway, we have been reading excerpts from Anne Frank's diary and my goal is to get her to identify feelings that Anne might have had during her hiding. Because it's a weakness of hers, it takes a boat-load of teacher cues to get her to think outside the concrete answers and instead dig deeper into the character's feelings and thoughts. Well during one tutorial I was trying to get her to understand things we take for granted; things that Anne realized that she no longer had access to. Fresh air, community with friends, good food, education, etc.

And as she continued to give me a blank stare and respond, "yeah" after everything I said (because her thing is pretending she understands and knows what I'm saying when really she would never come up with this on her own...love this girl but extremely frustrating to no end), I continued to teacher cue. And who knew this would kind of be like (or no, just exactly be...) God speaking to me, and reminding me how awesome I have it and how much He has provided for me. I absolutely take every breath for granted. Think of it, though, I don't think it's possible to be thankful for every single breath. That's a lot of thankfulness. I take my time with friends for granted. Now that I'm realizing people I love and care for might be moving on with life and moving away, I am kicking myself for not realizing earlier how amazing it has been that I have such a great circle of friends around me.

So wow. Very taxing to repeat myself over and over to this girl but again, this is what I need. While I'm trying to get something out of her, I ironically need to have something engrained into me like nothing else.

100% cheesy to talk about things I'm thankful for on Thanksgiving, but cheesy is usually great. So on that note, Happy Thanksgiving. I am thankful for you, friends:)