Lead, Kindly Light

The day started out grey.  And as the morning rolled into the afternoon, the skies grew darker and darker.  The clouds loomed, threatening and glaring.

I lokoed at at the skies with heaviness in my heart.  I felt abandoned, cold, and sad.  I whispered a plea for God to walk with me in the downpour, half-expecting Him to ignore me.  Then, grasping my tiny, flimsy, pathetic umbrella of “courage,” I stepped out to brave the storm.

And just as I did, God stepped in.  He covered my hand with His and guided it to lower the umbrella.  With His other hand, He reached up to the sky and parted the clouds.

The soft glow of sun warmed my now-upturned face.  I smiled, relieved.

Then God pointed, again with His free hand (His other was still wrapped around mine) toward the rainbow He had set in the sky.  I gazed at the magical arc, and I laughed, humbled.

I am a creature of habit, someone who finds security and solace in steady, stable, rhythmic patterns of life.  Some people call that monotony.  Others call it boredom.  I call it a haven.

Every day, I get up at the same time, go (more of less) to the same places, see the same faces, and end my day by speaking to the same three people.  Sure, there are variations in the details, but the skeleton of each cycle from sunrise to sunrise is mostly unchanging.  I like it that way.

I wonder what — if anything — that says about me.  Maybe it says I’m not adventurous.  Maybe it suggests that I crave control.  Maybe it means that I find joy enough in the substance of life, such that I don’t need whimsical scheduling to bring excitement to my day.

Or maybe it’s because I have already learned that no news is often good news.

I have a strange mental vascillation that changes with the winds from one extreme to the other, and back again, but rarely settles in the vacuous expanse inbetween.

Some days, I sense my smallness in this world acutely, and truly comprehend on a very deep level the Bible verse that reminds us that we are “a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.”  On those days, I understand that my significance is like one grain of sand in the vast Saharan Desert.

On other days, I am struck with an awe that is quickly tempered with humility as I reflect on the evidence of God’s special and particular attention in my life.  In those moments, I am freshly aware that God chose me twice:  once, before I was born, He chose me to live.  Then again, when He claimed my soul, He chose me to Live.

So it is between these two poles that I vascillate, and wonder at the paradoxical truth therein.

I have an addiction to Facebook, like many people born in the decade before and after the mid-1980s.

One function I frequent in particular is the photo function.  I love seeing recently-updated albums featuring any of the 765 friends/acquaintances who are connected to me in that virtual space.

I’ve noticed recently, however, that I gravitate toward engagement, wedding, and occasionally pregnancy, photos.  Maybe it’s all the beautiful smiles and proud grins, the gathering of friends and family, the flow of love that pours out of each image so profoundly that you could almost swear you heard a contented sigh.

But even as my eyes feed on those images and snapshots of bliss, the pictures always seem to leave me feeling a bit empty, a little bit hollow.  My heart feels a slight frown, a perceptible sinking.  Deep down, I think I fear that the “happy girl who has it all” in the pictures will never be me, and that while God has blessed me greatly with manythings, He may just pass me by on those things.

I hate to admit it, but it’s a fact.

I’m flying back “home” now — away from one home and back to another.  LittleTown is home because it’s where Mom and Dad are, and wherever they are will always automatically qualify as “home.”  LittleTown is also home because it’s where I spent the first eighteen years of my life — it’s the place that knew me before I ever went to college, law school, or became a  BigLaw attorney in the City.  So much of who I am, and why I am the way that I am, comes from growing up in that blue-collar, industrial, Danish-heavy LittleTown on the Lake.

At the same time, the City has in the last nine months become another type of home.  It is the place where I sleep, work, see friends, and go to church as an “adultling,” my newly-coined term for someone who is in that nether-zone between student and “real grown-up.”  Adultlings like me may pull in bigger salaries than we’d ever imagined to pay off debt that is greater than what we’d ever wish on anyone — but we’re still playing pretend when it comes to being actual adults.  We’re not there yet; we are, and will for the near future remain, adultlings.

The City is my day-to-day home, the place where I maintain a small adultling nest as I wait to grow up into a real adult with real responsibilities, like a mortgage or children.  The City is like a set of training wheels.  I don’t know when I’ll be ready for a real two-wheeler.

What I realized most acutely during this visit home is that neither home is fully “home.”  The longer I am away from LittleTown, the harder it is to relate to the people there, especially at church.  I’m trying to figure out why that is true.  But when I hear them talk about “the Lord” and “the Word,” it sounds just as foreign to me as I probably sound to my co-workers when I talk about “going to church” and “reading the Bible.”

I guess it’s all relative.  But the people at LittleTown Church seem so holy, in one sense — so alike in that way — all speaking the same holy language and urging each other to clearly and courageously share the Gospel as Paul urged the Ephesians.  I definitely relate to that desire, but I guess living in the City just gives me a different starting point.  Especially since I work at a place like my law firm, where people face many barriers when it comes to meeting God:  time, realizing their need, cultural resistance, etc.  So it’s not so simple as just outright sharing the Gospel.  This is something I have trouble getting across to people back in LittleTown home.

Likewise, though, in the same way that the zeal of LittleTown people weirds me out a little, the utter indifference of City-dwellers is foreign to me too.  How can so many people live their lives without the love of GOd in their lives?  How can they survive even a day with the eternal uncertainties of their lives hanging there, unanswered?  This perplexes me greatly.

So neither place is home — or, more accurately, neither place is entirely home.  I keep telling myself that God-willing, when I cease to be an adultling, and have a family and kids of my own, then I will finally settle down and have a true home.  But I’m a little skeptical.  God is probably more complicated than that.  And maybe He is keeping me in this perpetual state of discomfort so I long for my eternal Home.

It’s the Fourth of July and my last night at home before going back to the City.  It has been an emotional three-day trip back to the Land Flowing With Milk and Cheese.  I’ve had to reflect on and confront the ever-shifting tectonic plates of familial (dis)harmony, walk on eggshells around Dad about Rascal, and start to deal with the reality of doing long-distance with Rascal.

I am about to go to bed but pulled two things from the shelf in my bedroom just now as a challenge to myself.  First, I picked up “Black’s Law.”  I want to devote more of my free time to reading.  Second, I took this notebook.  I haven’t written in a while, and it’s high time I started again.

Lots of emotions are swimming around inside, and rightly so:  I’m in a period of great transition, uncertainty, and in some ways, instability.  Hopefully writing will help me sort through — or at least recognize — these feelings.

Lying beside me is my Bible.  I am grateful that once again I feel the great need to cling to God, and that deep down, I know His hand will be enough to sustain and carry me.