It's been a good year.

So I haven’t written a blog in a long time and I apologize for that. Over the last month and a half I’ve been trying my hand at managing the women’s center for St. Vincent de Paul, while looking for a job and a place to live out here in the bay area. So I’ve been pretty busy. It feels like a lot has happened since the last time I wrote a blog. There will be a new JV coming to St. Vincent’s and taking my spot as the Homeless Court Coordinator. In addition to that there will be a new women’s center supervisor. So changes are happening on this end. There were a few things I wanted to talk about the finishing up of a year of service and working at St. Vincent’s. Some of which I’ve said before, I’m sure.

This has been a year of joys and heartaches, on many different levels for me. I’ve seen miracles and I’ve seen things I would never care to see again. I can say as I look back on this year I definitely lived this year of my life to the extreme. I pushed myself to my absolute limits trying to do everything I could to live the best way I knew how. Trying to help people here at St. Vincent’s, be a good community member to my housemates, and try to live up to my own personal expectations of myself. But the thing I realized is it’s best to throw your expectations out the window, and JVC told me this coming into this year. Which is good advice because whatever expectations were dreamed up in my head a year ago about working a job across the country, and living with people I’ve never met before, were just that dreams. The reality of it was much different.

So that was a big thing I learned this year was that you never know what’s coming. Whatever you can imagine the future to be, chances are it will be much different. Thank god because I was pretty scared coming out here and imagined some pretty tough situations that I might have run into. But it also leaves me less afraid of the future and what might happen so I’m more able to open myself to new experiences. Anyways this is a lot of talking about myself, which I tend to do sometimes. But I wanted to sign off with a quote from Abraham Lincoln that says, "The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time." I’ve found that to be so true this year. I’ve found that it’s never useful cower in front of “what-ifs”. It’s much better to take them on like it doesn’t matter. And that’s it for me.

~Mike