Right now I'm taking a Psych Assessment class, one small and important step on my journey toward getting my professional counseling license. For the class, we had to conduct a handful of assessments on ourselves. Knowing my professor, one of his primary goals was to teach us what it's like to be in our clients' shoes by experiencing the testing process ourselves. It worked. I got appropriately frustrated by being pigeon-holed. This gamut of pretty narrow results are constructed by a stressfully small number of leading questions. I've never in my life wanted to cheat on a test... until this. So I guess it worked. I felt the stress of the testing-storm as if I were a client being assessed in a clinical environment. And it also further exposed a part of myself that wants to be perceived by others as extra wonderful – a part of myself which I find to be quite ugly.

But when I researched how some of the tests were created and what they really measured, I found something interesting. One of the common denominators among the personality tests was correlated to biodiversity. Some of the test results were related to the measurement of genetic polymorphism and there was some "serotonin transporter gene" language thrown in here and there. I find it endlessly fascinating to think about how genes morph to create further biodiversity. (I am, after all, married to a man who majored in Evolutionary Biology at Harvard! He's now a pastor, just so you know...which really adds icing to the cake that is this blog post.)

But what I love about biodiversity is that it's never just biological. I don't believe any diversity is single-faceted!

I find God to be a very creative Artist. He is so un-boring. I can't believe the amount of diversity that exists in my group of loved ones alone, let alone the entire earth. It's why I'm so intrigued by studies of trauma & resilience around the globe. It's why I love art & music. It's why I love love  l o v e  people.