"Oh...you're...you're YOU!"

Have you ever had that experience? You live your life with a certain group of people, and they tell you about some of their friends, or people they've heard about, or random stories or something, and then you go to a party, class, or work and, completely independent of the certain group of people, you end up meeting one of the individuals who is either a friend, person they've heard about, or individual from said random story?

That was probably one of the longest run-on sentences I've ever written...anyway.

I had that experience yesterday. My Best Friend, and another good friend (we'll call him "Second in Command") used to tell me about these two girls that they knew. They were referred to as simply "The Ali's." Well...I happen to work with one of the Alis, and as she started telling me a story involving Best Friend and Second in Command, I suddenly realized that she, was, in fact, not just a title, but honestly really and truly a person, who also happened to be the individual from our past discussions. She's going to read this and think, "You're weird" as will many others, but lets see if I can explain it a little better.

Do you ever have times in your life when things just suddenly become real to you? I had a lot of experiences like this a couple of summers ago, when we went to Palmyra, and then Gettysburg. Suddenly, things like the Sacred Grove were not just happy little pictures in my mind, they were real places where incredible things happened that began the restoration of the Church. The people who died at Gettysburg are real, and their graves in the cemetery at Gettysburg just made me cry. I walked along the rows of different headstones from various wars, and it just hit me--these are PEOPLE, well...were.

Other things have started to hit me for real too lately. Things like the fact that my family actually lives within driving distance of me, that the semester is only 2 months from being over, and that this is going to be a really awesome year. It's just...wow.

Life is real, life is earnest
And the grave is not the goal
Dust thou art, to dust returneth
Wast not spoken of the soul.
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow