It is a new decade and as I take my first steps in 2010, my mind settles into thoughts of horizons. I look out and think what might be on my horizon in the coming year and I smile as I realize that I have no idea. I have many suppositions, of course, but in my experience, those never lead to much. I can have hopes and longings and plans but those tend to fall apart and come back together again in ways I could never imagine.

So my horizon this year is flexible, fluid and every nuanced shade of gray. In my head, it sort of reminds me of the beach scene in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” But instead of laying on ice with crazy blue hair, I am standing in the sand, barefoot, stretching my arms out into the night air, unable to feel the cold, even though I am in a place that is cool and gray. All I can feel is continually curious and engaged with this peculiar story that God continues to tell with my life. All I keep looking at is this horizon in front of me, mesmerized at all that lies between us.

I will venture a guess that everyone’s horizons are different. When I look towards mine, it is always pulling me west. So many nights, more than I can count, I will be driving, usually at dusk, and as my car moves towards a receding, fading horizon, something jumps in me to press my foot on the gas and just keep driving west until I reach the ocean. I mentally calculate if my bank account could last me ’til California and I breathe deeply as I can almost feel the sand between my toes, the salty waves spraying onto my bare legs. But in my practicality, in the life that I have chosen for now, a life in which I am happy, I still always feel a sense of sadness to reluctantly pull into my driveway.

My horizon pulls me towards the places I always want to go, places I craved even before so many that I love lived amongst them. What is it about horizons that connect to such a deep internal place? They seem magnetized poles, stuck in the ground, one after another, in a line stretching on to infinity. I don’t think I will ever be immune to the ways that mine pulls me and I can’t tell you why it is west. It has just always been that way. While I can’t explain it, I still know that even in the assured knowledge that I will never find the end, I will spend my days happily running anyway.

But the end isn’t really what’s important, anyway. The middle is the most important part and I don’t want to waste it focusing on the ending. I’m not looking for a life of endings or a life of beginnings, but a life of middles. That’s where the story lives, it’s where my story and your story are being told. When you read a really great story, it’s not usually the beginning or the end that matters so much; it’s what the characters did in the middle. It’s what they did in the tension, in the moments when everything falls apart, when they fall apart, in the parts where they succeed and fail and discover humanity and brokenness and healing. Their horizons pull them into so many places that make no sense and hold truth in their lies and sometimes feel so beyond that they don’t know if they can take it anymore. But even then, even in the deepest, blackest darkness, a horizon always holds light, even if it’s only a pinprick or a promise of a sunrise.

I am drawn to my horizon because its beauty lies in what stretches between me and it. When I look over an expanse of ocean, it’s not the hazy indigo line where sky meets water that pulls me. It’s the miles and miles of ocean in between. Those are what I love the most and what I dream of as I sadly turn the key in my car and go inside. Perhaps tonight, as I close my eyes and listen to the cars pass by on the street, that mechanic whirring might fade into a quiet lapping of ocean swells.

Happy 2010.
What does your horizon look like?

So I have this wonderful friend named Caroline (oh, irony) who is currently living in China and who is, for lack of a more modern phrase, my “pen pal” of sorts.

We exchange emails pretty often, and so much of the time, I feel I work out my own heart in our correspondence. She is an incredibly smart, beautiful woman who has shared so much wisdom and encouragement with me. I have been struggling a lot lately, and she has such beautiful insight into my brokenness (sometimes, I feel like I should be paying her for therapy). This is a piece of our correspondence lately that I felt might be worth sharing, as the seasons are changing — literally for all, metaphorically for some.

Her: “My mind keeps wandering to the beginning of Ecclesiastes where it talks about seasons.  A time to reap, a time to sow, a time to be born, a time to die…all of that.  God is the one who brings about the seasons in His time.  Caroline, I am convinced that love will bloom in your life.  God will choose when that season will begin, and that’s what makes it the most beautiful.”

Me: “It’s funny when I look back on the last few years of my life, and see that nothing has turned out like I expected it to — it has all been so much better. Sometimes “better,” in that I have enjoyed it more, and sometimes simply “better” for me, even though it has hurt. You are so right, friend — we are so much smaller than our seasons, and in our finite smallness, we could never hope to control them. All we can see is the snowflakes, the buds on the trees, or the hearty crunch of falling leaves under our feet. But we are guided by a God that can cradle the air streams, the patterns of the stars, and the currents of the oceans in His palm. He can see how the seasons need to change in a perfect rhythm — He knows when enough snowflakes or buds or leaves are really enough, and when it is time for the music to change beat.”

There is this path near my college campus that is still my favorite path in the whole world to walk.

Whenever I got close to a person or trusted them or liked them, showing them this path was like lifting up a corner of my heart. It was sacred, intimate, vulnerable. Reject this path and you reject me. Love this path and you might be able to love me.

You don’t even really know it’s a path, because it’s not, really. Most of it is a set of train tracks that rarely sees trains, and the rest is crawling over this huge pile of dirt and bushes, only to find yourself in the back of a park that no one really uses. I could use all my fingers and toes, and all your fingers and toes, and still not arrive at a concrete number of times that my feet have beaten against this trail. When I get that ache in my chest for those days and those times, somehow, it seems to center on that path…most specifically, that path at night. (For there is no time better than the middle of the night for a really good walk. It’s true.)

Kirk

He was the first one who showed me this path. I have no idea where he heard about it or if he is the one who found it, but regardless, he was the first friend to walk beside me. With all 6′4″ of him and all 5′2″ of me, I imagine us to look like that scene in “Big Fish” where Edward Bloom and Karl the Giant are walking next to each other — a little ridiculous, but only a glance is needed to tell you that those are best friends.

One time, when we had just walked over the bridge that tells you you’re getting close, he led me up the steep embankment next to the tracks. He pushed the grass back and even in the moonlight, I could see it: small white stones that he had carefully laid out to spell “HOPE.”

Every time I walk down those tracks, I always think of that when I pass that grassy embankment. Out of all of my friends, I think he is the one that has taught me the most about hope.

…..

Andy

He taught me how to skip rocks in this park. I can’t skip a rock to save my life anymore, but that day, I could. I was wearing a pink tweed hat, and I made him take off his shoes to feel how wonderful it felt when the grass poked up between your toes.

He laughed at me.

…..

Noelle and Laura

We walked down there at 4:30 in the morning one time, after perming their hair and getting a little woozy on the chemicals. We ran into a homeless man while we were holding hands, skipping, and singing Christmas carols (in April). He must have thought we were absolutely out of our minds.

We probably were.

…..

Drew

We walked down here many times, often after grilled cheese and James Taylor records late at night. He was one of those friends who could call me at 2am and say, “Want to take a walk?” and we always would. We rarely ever saw other people there, day or night, except, of course, for the one day I accidentally dropped him in the river and jumped in after him without any pants on. Of course, when I was on shore, trying to tug jeans over my wet, shivering legs, I looked up to see a lady walking her dog. Go figure.

When I think of late-night walks, he is always who I think of. I miss him.

………………………..

I’m a grown-up now, or so they tell me. I ducked out of my apartment around 9:30 tonight, to run and meet up with my friend, Amanda, who was passing along a huge bag of extra produce from the CSA her family belongs to. (Standing the parking lot, passing over a plastic bag, I said I felt like we were making a drug deal. Except instead of drugs, it was kohlrabi and greens and broccoli.)

Going out once the sun was down felt a little foreign to me, but once I inhaled that cool, night air, I felt like myself again — the me that doesn’t have to worry about going into the office tomorrow or making sure my Blackberry’s charged or yawning because it’s past my bedtime. Instead, I felt like the barefoot girl in the pink tweed hat, laughing and spinning around backwards on railroad tracks next to a good friend.

I miss being her sometimes.
I miss taking those walks.
I miss the night.

[breathe in]
[breathe out]
Hello, old friend.

I wish I had time to do everything. Depending on the stimuli around me and the ideas and memories in front of me, what I want to do and where I want to be changes every moment. It’s not a discontentment with where I am…only a frustration that I physically cannot be everywhere at once, experiencing everything.

• I want to be here, close to my family, my favorite places, my church, my friends.
• I want to be in the Pacific Northwest, learning how to hike and live in a city that has more breweries per capita than anywhere else (I do believe Portland has this claim…or one similar.)
• I want to go to seminary/graduate school and learn more about this faith and life that I love so much.
• I want to be back in England so much sometimes that it feels like a sickness that will never go away.

I don’t know how to choose. Pray about it, I suppose. Realize that I’m barely 25 (in two and a half months) and that I have plenty of time to do all these things…I think. I realize that being in this place that I love with these people that I love could never be a waste, but I’m anxious to do it all, especially knowing that I cannot ever possibly “do it all.”

How do I choose between the lives that I long for and love?

“Change is loss and loss is change.”

Rob taught on this a few weeks ago, and as I was looking through my journal, I came across it again.

I have wrestled a lot with change lately, as anyone who reads this blog can see. I have tortured myself with finding God’s will, all the while not even taking off my blindfold to see what was already spread out before me. With a deep breath, I feel like I am finally at peace with where I am. The engines in my head have finally stopped spinning and for one moment, I am at rest.

I love my city, I love where I am. And He knew that. In all my fervent, dramatic, demanding prayers, He knew that I wouldn’t mind staying so much.

Life has changed as I lose these dreams, dropping them like coins, one by one, into a bank saved for later rainy days. I know that even when I feel static, He is always dynamic, always doing, always up to something.

He is a God that wastes nothing.

Not even my indecision. Not even my stubbornness. Not one single drop of my life. He uses it all. What for? His good and His glory, though I’m still figuring out what that even means. They’re big Bible words with a thousands layers of meaning and context and I am peeling away the layers, like an onion, day by day by day. I don’t know if I will ever reach the core.

In Just Do Something, the author, Kevin DeYoung, admonishes readers for hyperspiritualizing what he calls “nonmoral decisions,” such as where to live, what job to have, who to marry etc. These are important decisions, he acknowledges, and should be approached with prayer and guidance. But God gave us brains for a reason. He provided the Holy Spirit and that sneaky thing called wisdom for a purpose. If His will for a person centered around one certain place at one certain time with one certain person, well then, we’d all have made a huge mess of it, seeing how no one is divine. We get things wrong all the time. I make mistakes on a daily, if not hourly, basis. Life isn’t like a puzzle, where if you mislay one piece, the whole picture’s off. Life’s not even one picture or image. It simply…is. And in all its wildness and indecision and mystery, we are fighting our way through.

To try and understand, I have been thinking a lot about what DeYoung calls God’s “will of decree.” This states that God has ordained all that will happen and it is all according to His sovereign will. Yet still, knowing that these life plans center around flawed human creatures, I have to think that He took all of our missteps, our shots in the dark, our giant errors and arrogant misjudgments, and found ways to redeem them all. Even in the tiniest act of hope, His will and His love is seen.

I watched “Hotel Rwanda” for the first time tonight, and my head is still spinning. After seeing and hearing of the atrocities that happened in Rwanda in 1994, I found myself questioning how in the hell God’s good will was present there. Was He so greedy that He needed genocide in order to be revealed? How was I born into a loving middle-class family that showered me with affection and safety, while these Rwandan children rode down their streets to see the bodies of their neighbors littering the lawn? It was most shocking to me to see that the genocide wasn’t just in remote, primal villages where people didn’t know any better. It also happened in Kigali, a modern, bustling city with houses and people not so different from here. One of the opening scenes shows little girls in their backyard, skipping rope in sundresses. It was so…normal. And days later, it was hell on earth. When I see things like that, sometimes I wonder why God needs Hell at all, or even if it’s a real place. With all of the hatred and tragedy that swallows up the world here and now, isn’t it enough? Isn’t this enough?

I don’t know. I don’t have answers, and I don’t think I ever will. Some would shake the Bible under my nose and tell me there are all the answers. In this book, in this verse, it tells you this thing. While I don’t discredit the Bible, I also don’t think it’s the sum of all the answers. Mostly, it just gives me more questions…that will become more questions…that will lead to more questions. And that’s okay. I’d rather spend my whole life searching than cemented in apathy, convinced that all that I don’t know isn’t worth knowing anyway.

For now, I am here. I see God and His kingdom in what I am doing each day, and that is what He wants. If I decide to pick up and go someday, if I finish what I am doing here and see another opportunity to be His hands and feet somewhere else, I’ll gladly go and with His blessing, I think. Life is not so much about the beginning or middle or end as it is about tension between all three.

If I miss the point, there is always another point to be known.

If I misread the signs, the Holy Spirit will still be there, patiently dancing through each breeze and heartbeat, leading me on in its infinite mystery.

If I doubt or can’t believe, His love can handle that.

And that’s really it I think – no matter what, His love can handle all I throw at it. And that has to be enough.

It seems despite all my efforts and prayers, God has plans for me here. I still don’t know what those are, but masquerading as a sinking, unsettled feeling in my stomach, He gave me an answer.

And the answer was “Stay.”

I didn’t want to hear it. I wanted to ignore it, pass it off as fear, but He was grave and insistent.
Stay.

Awhile back, I was reading a blog that said the following: “I am finding that is better to be where God wants you than to be where you want to be. “

Where I want to be is mountains and oceans, new towns and people, new sunlight pouring through new windows as I arrange my books in a new home, new farmer’s markets, and a new me. But His Hands on my shoulders are heavy and kind. I am beginning to understand what it means to be where He wants me. And I am gaining peace about it, day by day. This rampant wanderlust, this urge to go and do and see, it’s still there. But its voice is getting quieter, though not weaker. I am struggling to accept that I don’t always know what’s best for me, and that things are good can still be hard and leave you gritting your teeth. I don’t always want what He wants or what’s best, but I will accept it on pure faith, the kind that seeps from your backbone and not always your heart.

Spring is coming in West Michigan, and I know that it’s going to be beautiful.

I spend so much time demanding so much of God. In ways, it feels like I give up on living sometimes, and just ask Him to do it all. I use my cluelessness on the matters of life as an excuse, but really, it’s not.

I’d just rather not make mistakes, or screw up, or be wrong.
So if I heave all of them onto God, then I don’t have to feel any of those things so directly, so personally. I can put it all down to “misinterpretation of divine will” or some such nonsense.

Just when I think I have it all figured out, God likes to laugh at my plans, and remind me that I will never have grand visions of all the things He has laid out. I just have to trust, move forward inch by inch, and someday, when the humanity drops as a blindfold from my eyes, I will finally see the big picture.

CS Lewis once wrote in A Grief Observed this: “Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem.”

Jack, I think you’re right. God owes me no explanations and He never has.
I’m trying to get better at this trust thing. Because let’s face it, His answers are always so much better than my questions.

Remember those giant flat wheelie-things on the playground that had a bunch of railings on them; one person would start pushing it in circles, then jump on and it would whirl around so fast that by the end of the ride, you felt like your eyeballs were in your toes, and you stumbled dizzily around, trying not to throw up?

My brain feels like that right now.

I have so much on my mind, and cannot seem to focus in on one thought without fifty others flooding in. All my thoughts are bleeding into one another, like watercolors. Big decisions are looming in front of me like skyscrapers and I feel so, so small. One passage from Donald Miller’s Through Painted Deserts keep swirling around in my watercolor thoughts, so I thought I’d share. I love this book possibly more than almost any other book I’ve read, so when I come to big life decisions, I tend to come back to it again and again. What he shares in his author’s notes in the beginning has provided much insight to me and I find it very wise. I read it out loud last week, on the deserted beach, and I wept, both for its beauty and how much it frightened me.

…I could not have known then that if I had been born here, I would have left here, gone someplace south to deal with horses, to get on some open land where you can see tomorrow’s storm brewing over a high desert. I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing, and I want to change because it is God’s way. All my life I have been changing. I changed from a baby to a child, from soft toys to play daggers. I changed into a teenager to drive a car, into a worker to spend some money. I will change into a husband to love a woman, into a father to love a child, change houses so we are near water, and again so we are near mountains, and again so we are near friends, keep changing with my wife, getting our love so it dies and gets born again and again, like a garden, fed by four seasons, a cycle of change. Everybody has to change, or they expire. Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.

I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.

Only the good stories have the characters different at the end than they were at the beginning. And the closest thing I can liken life to is a book, the way it stretches out on paper, page after page, as if to trick the mind into thinking it isn’t all happening at once.

Time has pressed you and me into a book, too, this tiny chapter we share together, this vapor of a scene, pulling our seconds into minutes and minutes into hours. Everything we were is no more, and what we will become, will become what was. This is from where story stems, the stuff of its construction lying at our feet like cut strips of philosophy. I sometimes look into the endless heavens, the cosmos of which we can’t find the edge, and ask God what it means. Did You really do all of this to dazzle us? Do You really keep it shifting, rolling round the pinions to stave off boredom? God forbid Your glory would be our distraction. And God forbid we would ignore Your glory.

…no, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath:

I’ll tell you how the sun rose
A ribbon at a time…

It’s a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn’t matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence. And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you once were . . . and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again will be.

So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly toward its closure, knowing the last lines will speak of something beautiful, of the end of something long and earned, and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualification.

And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn’t it?

It might be time for you to go. It might be time to change, to shine out.

I want to repeat one word for you:

Leave.

Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn’t it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don’t worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed.

Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts

My weekend away was better than I could have imagined; a concentrated healing balm that soothed and stretched and opened me up in many directions all at once. I wrote a lot while I was there, and here’s what came out:

***

It feels so strange to be this alone. Turning off my phone, turning off the wireless internet switch on my laptop – the only thing I am allowing myself is music. Sometimes I don’t know what to do with this silence – for less than two days, I brought seven books. Excessive? I call it choice, options, a buffet of literature. Some poetry, some Scripture, a play, some essays, some narrative. I find different parts of myself in it all.

(Some of my grand assortment.)

***

To fill the silence with some sort of movement, I do yoga. I practice yoga, though not well and not as frequently as I should if I claim to do it. As I was following the video podcast that I use today (the idea of doing yoga in front of other people is horrifying to me, akin to getting a medical exam in front of a crowd), I came to see where the benefits in yoga lie. Yoga masters will tell you it’s the breathing, it’s the pushing out of the bad, and the drawing in of the good. As I stretched forward, leaning into the sunlight of the blue sky out of the windows in front of me, it became clear. It’s the sheer force of the awareness that makes yoga so valuable for me – harnessing in all my renegade thoughts and distractions, and rooting them in the focus on tension. The tension between movement and rest, between inhale and exhale, between pain and relief. I’m sure it all has something to do with toxins in your muscles and aligning my chi, whatever that may be, but for me, I find my most valuable benefit in the awareness it brings to me of the tension that I constantly live in, and that, despite what the everyday, brain-buzzing fogginess may tell me, this balance is essential to what it means to be human. The one pose that you will find in every yoga session is the Shivasna, or the resting pose. It is exactly what it sounds like; at the end of a class, you lay on the ground, palms up, resting for usually about five or ten minutes. This is when yoga really does its work, though I couldn’t tell you exactly what it’s doing. All I know is that when I get up, it’s not the sore muscles that I attend to or the hair hanging in my eyes; it’s the renewed feeling, that reminder of the tension that comes to its full restorative power in rest.

***

I just saw my first seagull of the season, surfing on the top of a breeze, slicing through the chilly spring air. Though I will whine and complain throughout the winter on how Michigan is God’s joke on humanity, it all changes once the snow begins to melt and spring arrives. (You’d think everyone in this state is bipolar but I’ll refute that; it’s only the weather that is. If we are too, then we can’t help it.) But ah, there is nothing like summer in West Michigan – I think it’s how I handle all the other frustrations of the weather. The sapphire lakes, stretching out like a cat on a long, sandy rug, some of the most beautiful coastline you will ever see. Acres of maize-colored beaches, with crumbly sand that sticks to your toes and covers the floor mats in your car, but that you cannot help but walk a little slower, just to feel the grains touching your feet. My favorite ice cream shops open; the one that has the toasted coconut ice cream that my sister and I have driven 45 minutes to get because it’s so good. I gather armfuls of flowers, just to touch the velvety petals and inhale the wet scent of the rain-dropped green. I can hear the crackle of grills starting up again as soon as the snow melts; the eternal scent of summer – charcoal and hot concrete, mixed with the wild, green smell of the lake. It hurts to think of the summers that I spent holed up in cement walls, working, and came to the end of August only to realize that I never even got to the lake that summer. That should be a crime punishable by the state of Michigan; think on that, Governor Granholm.

(This view of the Sleeping Bear Dunes from two summers ago is what I remember when winter makes me feel like weeping.)

***

When I am feeling sensuous, I read Frances Mayes, drink wine and listen to Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” album, where her voice is gravelly from years of cigarettes and mouthfuls of chord changes. Tonight, I am drinking red wine and eating grapes; something that might seem like a redundant juxtaposition, but instead, feels like what Bacchus (and God) intended. Eating the impossibly fresh and bursting fruit and drinking its lifeblood; it feels so basic, so natural. I savor the connections, the strains of its sweetness, its age and its youth; it’s so beautiful, beautiful. This is the Bella Tuscany coming out in me; I have been reading and rereading Frances Mayes for years and just finished another one of her books. I am convinced that we are secretly friends; a friendship I openly acknowledge, one that she has yet to find out about. I imagine in some ways, we all have friends around the world that we don’t know about yet. I suppose the lucky ones do. I think I tend to see the world through photographs and stories; ones I take with my eyes and write in my mind, every moment, every glance, every breath, every rustle of wind and taste of spring air. All my life, I have been writing a novel in my heart and each day, I am finding out a little bit more about the story.

(Hello my sweet contradiction. It was delicious…hence why all the grapes are almost gone.)

***

I am watching a father and son take a walk outside of the condo that I am staying at. They are wearing the same shoes and pants, and walking in the exact same manner; aimless yet with purpose. With their stocking caps, teeth chattering through those first few lighted evenings of spring, it reminds me of how God must see us. So small, unable to really find our way on our own, but yet He can still look down, and say “Yes, that’s my child. See, he looks a little like me.”

***

It’s so strange to walk on sand that is still partially frozen, and to see piles of ice make a pearl necklace around the coastline of the lake. Yet the sun is warm and in a sweatshirt and jeans, only my nose feels the chill still lingering the air. I hear You here, in the rhythmic lap of the waves, in the desolation that is just beginning to reawaken. A steady whisper of “Go,” and “Stay.” Keep your heart steady here in this beauty, but go seek where else I have lavished it.

There is something so humbling about seeing something no person has touched in months, like the pond ripples that are scattered across the sand. I try to picture what this place must look like in a snowstorm and it frightens me. It is beautiful, yes, but as I climb up the coastline of gritty ice, I look down into the churning water and draw back, knowing even on a mild day like today, the water is a terrible force. Today it seems so lonely, like it was hoping I would come here and it brought out the sun just for me. The sky is so deeply blue that its pour down my throat like water, filling me up to the brim until I feel like I can’t take anymore. Yet something inside me fills and refills, always thirsty for more blue sky. I listen to the crackling schoolgirl giggles of the dried reeds and beach grass, rubbing against each other and flirting in the cool breeze. A thawing gold, they stand out snappily from the crumbling brown of the sand and the sharp colbalt blue of the sky. I feel strange here, some dreamy-eyed girl with a notebook, reading aloud to myself and stretching out my arms to the sky. My only companions are far as I can see are some fisherman a few hundred yards down, content to ignore me, and after the first hour, leave for home with their daily catch. I am now alone on this wild, windy stretch and I lay down in the sand, surprised at how I don’t sink down in it. The ground is still firm enough to not yield to my weight, yet soft enough to lull me into a light sleep. I stare and stare at the blue sky until my eyes begin to hurt. Breathing in, breathing out, the air tastes and smells like blues and greens, that distinctive smell of the Great Lakes.

(Lake Michigan, wearing its pearl necklace. Sorry James if this seems familiar, I must have internalized your last entry!)

***

In a way, I think I feel a little left behind. I have friends who’ve been brave enough to scatter themselves across the world, yet I’m still here, peering over life’s cliff, repeatedly asking, “How’s the water? Is it okay?” I’m not asking anymore, I’m jumping. More on that later.

In reading through the Bible, the willingness to follow is astonishing. Whether it’s an Old Testament prophet following God into the wilderness, or a disciple taking up the yoke of their rabbi, Christianity has always been a faith of, well, faith. It has always been a way of life that reminds us that we are never settled into our own plans, never absolved of the responsibility of listening to what God has to say.

Hebrews 11 begins like this: “The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It’s our handle on what we can’t see. The act of faith is what distinguished our ancestors, set them above the crowd.”

Our faith is called to be imaginative, flexible, open, and dynamic.  If we trust that God goes before us in all things, sometimes all we have to go by are footprints.

In Genesis chapter 12, Abram is called out from his country to follow God into an unknown land.

“The LORD had said to Abram, ‘Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you.

‘I will make you into a great nation
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.

I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.’

So Abram left, as the LORD had told him.”
Genesis 12:1-4

When you think of the true scale of what this meant, it’s staggering. Leaving your home, what you’ve always known, just because of a pull in your heart that won’t quit, a concrete feeling in your gut, a still, small voice in your ear. No long-term plans, no careful arrangements, no pro and con lists. Abram was 75 years old when God called him out of his father’s country and into another land. It’s easy enough to be a twentysomething, sniffing the air for adventure, but it’s entirely different to be settled, with a family, and still be willing to listen when you hear what Yahweh is saying. Most of us would say that we don’t have the courage to have that much faith.

To follow the footprints of those like Abram, John the Baptist, and even Jesus himself, I am withdrawing to the wild, to the silent beauty of the coast of Lake Michigan this weekend to pray, to seek, to be quiet, to listen. Somewhere along the way, I’ve stopped listening. I’ve unconsciously convinced myself that God needs my advice, needs my direction, needs to understand first what I want, and then form His plans accordingly. And in His love, He is drawing these notions out of me like poison from a wound. He is warning me that if I ask for Him, if I seek Him with all of my heart, I’d better be ready to get what I ask for. I am bracing myself for the intensity of His wildness, the scope of His dreams for me, summoning the courage to live out the faith that asks everything of me.

I’m weary of this dance that I’ve been doing for months (well, years, if I’m honest). I crave freedom from needing the last word, from needing control, from having to know and research and list and arrange, from needing more options until all I do is contemplate and never DO. I want to listen and have the courage, like Abram, to follow the footprints.

I will leave you with these words of Mars Hill’s own Rob Bell (for as in most things, he can say it far better than I):

“Central to the Christian experience is the art of questioning God. Not belligerent, arrogant questions that have no respect for our Maker, but naked, honest, vulnerable, raw questions arising out of the awe that comes from engaging the living God. This type of questioning frees us. Frees us from having it all figured out. Frees us from having answers to everything. Frees us from having to be right. It allows us to have moments when we come to the end of our ability to comprehend. Moments when the silence is enough.”