clark debonair.

I have been requested to blog because I am in transit at the moment. The captain has fixed our cruising altitude at 34,000 feet, and we are bound for Albuquerque. It is really neat to be able to be connected from this high up.

Tomorrow and Wednesday I take the bar exam. At this point, I’m pretty excited about it. Later in the day, I’ll probably be nervous about it. But when I board the flight back to Texas, I’ll be nothing but unequivocally excited for the first time in a long time. Lots of hard work and worry has paved the road for this milestone. But for the grace of God and the patience of Sara I would not have been able to accomplish this great feat.

Bar exam and graduation. That’s what’s on tap for this week. What a week it will be.

And then there’s August!

Oh, and I definitely wore my “Where Fun Goes to Die” shirt today. Unashamedly.

This quarter, more than any other, culminates in multiple substantial milestones. As the last quarter, that’s certainly appropriate.

The ol’ PC Partner (@pbpope) and I both wore our trial boots to the courthouse on Tuesday. We had been laboriously defending the plaintiff for months. He was without truck and income because of the two defendants we sued. We worked double-time during discovery, hoping that we would reach trial at long last. We summarily zipped through summary judgment. For some strange reason, we conducted voir dire before we had even taken our first deposition. We charged through slapping together a proposed charge. Finally, we had reached trial. After seven or eight hours, we had a verdict. We were victorious.

If this were real, I wouldn’t be giving such a summary. I might say that the jury came back in our favor and leave it at that. But this is Practice Court. I’ve never felt so accomplished in seeing something in which I have toiled come to fruition. It really is a unique experience. Only on the other side of it does the madness make sense.

As it stands, I’ve got three finals, the bar exam, and the MPRE between me and my law license. I graduate at the end of this month, the same month that I turned 24. Next month has even more excitement. Sara and I move to New Mexico and get married. It’s not at all what I had envisioned when Sara and I started this law school adventure some two and a half years ago. But it’s a great plan that God has laid out for us. I’ve had all this anxiety, hoping for things to happen a certain way, but then they happen in even more gracious ways.

In my small world, this all has been a Big Trial. And I’m all the better for it. It wasn’t quite the victory I had in mind, but I think it tastes sweeter after all the frustration, patience, and hard work (not all in equal portions, mind you).

As with all good things in my life, I did not accomplish this on my own. Support from Sara, family, my colleagues in the law, and my aforementioned PC partner have helped carry me this far. Also, the surety of attending St. Alban’s many Sundays to share in the Eucharist.

I do hope that in my justified pride at graduation, I remember to be proud first of my support system. What a great gift. I very much look forward to sharing such joy with friends and family.

Something they don’t tell you very much about at BLS is the Practice Court program. Before you choose this school, they use decisively ambiguous words like “rigorous” and “challenging” to chide you (oh, well, how bad can a really good challenge be?) while simultaneously remaining somewhat honest about its true nature. Students going through the process will shoot you straight–if you can find them. But when you’re a doe-eyed 1Q or someone being shuttled through orientation or preview days, there’s not much a PC student gasping for air can tell you that you’d be willing or able to listen to. The only time you might listen is when it’s too late to do anything about it like, say, when it’s your quarter before PC.

It’s not like anyone is actively hiding the ball–the only instance I can think that’s anywhere close to that is the hyped-up admissions literature, which is to be expected. Man, I could just imagine admissions literature that had full disclosure, not just for BLS, but for any school. Let us eliminate all puffery, and in the interest of full disclosure say that these are our weak points! It’s not only impractical, it’s just downright silly. But, aside from the admissions literature (which I have not personally seen since I enrolled), I don’t think anyone is really trying to hide anything. Yet I come back to this idea of a mystique.

I know I’ve contributed to the program’s mystique in not being a regular blogger about my experiences. The truth is that you can read a lot from my silence. That sounds like a cop-out, and it is. But I’m being 100 percent truthful in saying that there was literally no time for me personally to reflect upon what I was doing or look forward to any concrete goal ahead of me. That, generally, has been what this blog has been about. It’s been a time for personal reflection and an opportunity to voice goals and hopes for the future as well.

But, in the Practice Court program, there’s no such time. Keeping one’s head down and focused on the 2 ft x 3 ft space of desk in front of you is really your only priority 5 days a week. Every waking moment is sacrificed to preparation for class and for advocacy exercises. Sure, there’s an hour or two a day that you take for yourself most days, but that’s not without its accompanying guilt. I did manage that guilt quite well; I was able to convince myself that mental sanity was still a bigger priority than school.

Through it all, I am exceedingly glad for the time that I took away from school, as scarce as it was. I am proud of my friends and I for staying as level-headed as we could about this whole thing. I am so thankful for Sara and her patience through this. It has, no doubt at all, been very trying on her, too.

I have a wonderful life, and I’ve faced some recent challenges alongside my friends (and with Sara’s help), and I have so much for which to be thankful. Yes, even these challenges are a humbling blessing in themselves. Thus ends this reflection. Now, I must commence studies for this quarter’s last exam!