Just Some Thoughts

It's August and I'm tired and there are crickets singing and I just finished reading Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. 

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There's a fantasy novel brewing inside me. It's teaching me to jump into writing without worrying about quality or a complete plan. I'm starting with some haphazard world-building, a few characters I like a lot, some bad guys with motives yet to be discovered, and an epic soundtrack in my head. 

*shrugs* I'm a writer. It's a start.

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This morning I woke up in a tent with friends, sore from hiking 13.5 miles yesterday. We drank coffee together around a campfire, most of us in jackets because the air had a bit of a chill snap to it for deep summer. We talked about Jesus and relationships, two topics right now that at once feed a desire inside me and make me squirm. 

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I'm home, doing laundry, reminding myself to drink water, picking my way around objects in a messy room, wrestling with big life questions but for once leaning into them and wrestling instead of running away. Sometimes the biggest battles are fought in the midst of laundry and trying to find something edible in the fridge.

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I've been thinking about seasons. God didn't have to give us seasons, but He did, just like fireflies and waterfalls and sunrises. Spring, summer, fall, winter, if you're in the right places around the world, you get all four and it reminds you that change is good. I need change, a change from sluggish warm air and the memories trapped with it. I need air with that fresh snap I got a taste of this morning, air that promises new things. 

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2017 has felt out of sorts. It's been a year of exploration and learning, and of discovering emotional pain strong enough to be felt physically. It's been a year of discovering how to befriend that pain rather than ignore it, fight it, or submit to it. If pain is my friend, I can learn from it, it can be the iron that sharpens me as one man sharpens another. 

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Last year, I was the person content to stay far back from the edge of the cliff. Thirty feet away was close enough. Yesterday I discovered that now I'm the person who army-crawls up to the edge of the drop-off and peers over, nose against dusty rock, watching the treetops sway fifty feet below. I am new and I don't know who the old me was last year and that is good and normal and okay. 

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Is it so hard to imagine that the Creator of the universe might actually know what He's doing in my life, that He might actually know what's best? Is it so hard to imagine that life comes in seasons because He has things for me to learn and experience, and that He gives me the strength to walk and breathe through each one? Is it so hard to imagine that He is wiser and has been doing this Father and Savior thing for eternity, in which there is no beginning or end, and I have no reason to distrust Him, is it so hard to imagine that He is outside of time and true comprehension and is not limited to anything, let alone my circumstances or my failures? 

How prideful it would be to think that my failures could limit God. 

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The TV is in front of me, but I think I'll start another book. Out of Sorts, by Sarah Bessey. Appropriate. I need a book that I can relate to right now and I have a strong feeling that this will be one of them. 

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Just some thoughts, friends. Feel free to share yours.

Cheers,

Alicyn 

Photo by ANDRIK ↟ LANGFIELD ↟ PETRIDES on Unsplash