Allison (My Sacred Life, Sunday)

Today, my second daughter in order of arrival, Allison, is my focus for Sacred Life Sunday.

Allison is a force of nature. Her first passion, at first glance, appears to be Ultimate Frisbee--these days, more often called just "Ultimate"--which is a well-established sport with elements of football, in that it is played on a rectagular field and has defined scoring areas at either end of the field, but is an almost nonstop game more like soccer--only after one team scores is there a stoppage in play. This first photo shows Alli scoring a point for her team at a national tournament a couple of years ago.


So, she loves this game and has been playing it at quite a high level now for several years. But my own perspective of Alli (that's what her friends call her) is that her real, central passion is motion. Since you cannot play Ultimate all the time, she has other interests. I would list them all, but I have not spoken with Allison in several days, which means she probably has found several other things to become involved with by now. She has a large commitment to her church, including a mission trip planned to Thailand during school break to work on behalf of tsunami survivors in several locations (there remains a huge amount of recovery work to be done in that part of the world, even as the short-attention-span rest of the world has moved on now). As a sophomore in the College of Engineering at the University of Colorado, she has a course load which most would find enough to keep them busy.

Allison, though, finds activity to fill seemingly every available minute. We had dinner with her in Boulder this past week, and it took some doing to find a slot in her schedule where that would fit. Even that evening, she had an informational meeting to attend to learn more about being a tutor/learning assistant for freshman calculus students next semester.

Looking back a few years, she played years of competitive softball (she made her high-school varsity team only to break her ankle the last practice before the season started), she took up rock climbing, a sport she continues to pursue mostly indoors now (I'm not arguing with that choice!), she plays the guitar beautifully, learned sailing during a summer trip with a friend to her family's vacation spot in Maryland, and probably four or five other avenues of activity I don't recall or never knew about!

She does, though, slow down sometimes. A good friend of ours, Laraaji, captured Allison as she was working at the Boulder Teahouse this summer.

We were having lunch with Laraaji, who lives in New York City but was in Boulder teaching at a seminar nearby. We were lucky enough to visit the Teahouse when Allison was working, and Laraaji was taking lots of pictures of the beautiful interior of the teahouse when he took this shot. We didn't even know he had managed to capture Allison in a still moment until he emailed the picture to us a few days later.

She is such a beauty, and precious to me in a way only another father could understand. I'm so proud of her devotion to those less fortunate or those behind her on the learning curve--she has been a leader in showing newbies the way in every sport she has undertaken, as well as academically--and I can't wait to see what she decides to do vocationally.

For her, my wish is that she finds work she loves just as much as she loves the life she has today.

Allison...my Sacred Life Sunday today.