Thoughts, scattered, about leaving

Somehow it is almost that time again… my fifth trans-Atlantic flight in 11 months looms on Sunday. Another spate of good-byes and the tedious weighing of suitcases packed to gills with books and warm winter clothes.

Sometimes, contemplating the year ahead, I am swept up again in that wave of movie-soundtrack expansiveness of soul and heart, and I feel buoyed up on something strong and brave. Mostly these are times I’m driving west in early evening and that peculiar golden color of sunlight stretches across the brown fields, and the irrigation sprinkles cut the sky into geometric tatters.

Other moments I hate that I’m leaving again, knowing that life rumbles on for everyone here – people get engaged, celebrate weddings, have babies, buy houses, paint their family rooms, take vacations… and I return for my 10th high school reunion very much the same person I’ve always been, with not much to show for the changes I’ve buffeted through. I feel outside of the ordinary happenings of life, like someone pressing their nose against a glass window but never invited in for long.

I try to hear beneath all of this coming and going, the sounds of growing up and settling down, something even deeper and more fundamental. I’m trying to hear in this odd-shaped melody a song that makes sense out of my traveling, of my choices. And I do believe there’s a song being sung out of all of this. And not by me. And I try to let it fill my ears with something more beautiful than loneliness or uncertainty.

Sometimes my individuality, my singleness, the lone-cowgirl-silhouetted-against-the-sunset image, presses in on my chest with a tightness that causes me to question everything. Navigating all these conflicting emotions and desires, the God-given ones and the distracting false temptations, is the battle of every single day. It’s a battle between what the heart wants and what the heart wants more. I want a brave heart.

And the grass is always greener… and friends wish they were me, free to travel, doing a job I love, the constantly-changing scenery, countries new to the eyes.

I believe, I have to, that there is a new song ahead, but I don’t know the words yet, or even have a hint of its tune. “Yet this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness. I say to myself, ‘The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for Him.’ The Lord is good to those whose hope is in Him, to the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. It is good for a man to bear the yoke while he is young.” (Lam. 3:21-27).

So it’s not up to me to hold onto joy as if it were a fragile vase that will break if I let it slip out of my hands. It’s a river I’m meant to wade in, up to my knees – a river whose streams make glad the City of God.

A friend prayed for me recently, that I would really experience God’s faithfulness this year. And that is my hope, for a new song whose Singer is my Lover and my Father, and I might find my home in its melody. Or a new plot of land, as Caedmon’s Call has expressed it, where redemption can be found:

“Out on these western plains
You can see for a million miles,
There’s a thousand exits
between me and the state line

Next forty acres
redemption to be found
just along down the way
there is a place where
no plow blade has turned the ground
you will turn it over
‘cause out here, hope remains.
Out here hope remains.”

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Funny how struggles repeat themselves. This is what I wrote last July, a month before leaving for Lithuania the first time:

“I know I need more of the Lord, and to seek Him more deeply. My daily words and thoughts and actions do not mirror Him – and that is more telling than a life spent on grand Godly schemes. My heart still runs after the fleeting thoughts of guys, and being admired and wanting to be loved, to be beautiful. More deeply, I need the Kingdom, to be a witness of its coming into the world – to bring it about – all other pursuits aside. I’m scattered and malleable.…

I need to feel this goodbye, or I’ll wake up alone some night next month and wonder where I am, how I’ve gotten there. But my love is so deep, I think it’s easier to go numb and hollow than to feel it. Folk songs on my Ipod pump into my ears, into my car as I drive I25 at sunset – the mountains all lit with beams through the clouds, blue light spread out over the sunflower fields and rooftops – and I’m like a drop of rain before it streams down a window, quivering at the moment of fullness. One prick, and it falls, too full to hold itself together any longer.

Love is the curse and the cure. The beauty and the pain all together. All at once.”