Stop and smell the pumpkin spice cookies

I'm slowly learning that God often writes us love letters when we least expect them. I was stressed to the limit today, with my final dress rehearsal tonight (my lines being far more shaky than they ought to be), about thirty papers on The Red Badge of Courage left to grade by tomorrow, and functioning (as has been the norm for the last several years) on about two hours of sleep and two liters of Mountain Dew.

Then, along came one of my drama students into my study hall. "Miss S., I brought you a cookie!"

A yummy, delicious, homemade pumpkin spice cookie. Singularly delicious. I just finished it.

Yep. Unmistakably a love letter from the divine Pen. There's an old platitude that says something like "courage is just fear which has held on one moment longer"; as a corollary, I'm rapidly learning that joy is just angst which has taken a nap.