Figments and Choice

I'm headed home, yeah
But I'm not so sure
That home is a place
You can still get to by train

An unhappy combination of maudlin sentimentalism, a head cold, and a recent of episode of Fringe have me pondering my present life. In the episode, the Fringe team is still trying to work out what to do with Peter who knows enough of the world to belong to it, and yet enough is different that the world cannot belong to him. Everyone seems to have forgotten him in the brief span of time between his disappearance and reappearance - unless he disappeared in one place and reappeared in another, in which case, they did not forget him. They never even knew him.

Right now I feel like I somehow jumped the tracks, and my train is steaming somewhere that I didn't realize it could go. Just after I got out of high school, I wrote in my journal that I felt like a mountain climber who had just conquered the apex of the mountain which had always stood before her in her quest. The plain that stretched away before me toward infinity was one which I had heard tales of, but which I did not recognize. But at least I had my first points along the trail. I would go to IMPACT 360, and then probably to Hillsdale since I had deferred my enrollment for a year and had a decent financial aid offer. Oh, but when I reached IMPACT, I felt that Hillsdale was not the right direction for me and turned to CIU and Biola instead. When the thought of the debt I incurred from IMPACT stirred around in my subconscious, I decided to take off school for a semester to try to pay some of it back. Instead, God had other plans for me, so I ended up at a discipleship training school in Harrisburg for eight months. While there, I finalized admission plans for Biola and Torrey, setting my sights on the exhilarating possibilities for the future and a completely different world. Instead, my dreams turned to sand, and I found myself living with my sister near Philly, working at Starbucks and going to community college. Do I feel like there was a point in my life when I was seamlessly transferred into a completely different timeline? Oh heck yes. Whose life am I living and why do I act like this is normal? But how do I choose to live any other way? How else do I explain the way that I ended up here, barely in contact with people who've changed my life and with a vision that has narrowed even more rapidly than it expanded.

And perhaps that's over-romanticizing on my behalf. Perhaps it's an excuse, and a lousy one, for the way that I have chosen to allocate my time: to work, work, and more work, if only to cover the gaping holes. Whatever happened to the boundless wonder of "The path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, that shines brighter and brighter until the full day"? What happened to the sighs and gasps of delight over each new neatly turned paradox fresh from the pages of Orthodoxy? When did I cease to care about the things that fueled me with joy?

Hadassah shared with me recently about certain crutches that God has been removing over the past year. I could definitely connect with that. It's like when they talk about the beauty treatments that Esther and the other candidates for queenhood had to undergo: part of their rituals involved sloughing off a significant amount of the outer layer of their skin until it was soft as a baby's. Sometimes we get a massive build up of dead skin that we protect ourselves with because it's warm and safe and familiar. But God knows better than I do, so He lovingly begins to scrape away the dead bits. It's painful, oh, how painful, but He knows that when He's done, I'll be so much more beautiful and I won't be able to hide the life that is inside of me.

Abba, let Your love my heart's one desire and the fuel from which I am able to connect with others. So much of life feels small, but Your work is hidden from my eyes, and You are a painter on a finer level than what I can comprehend. Help me not to despair in this moments when everything seems strange and broken. You know the plans that You have for me, and I can rest securely in that knowledge.

I'm headed home, yeah
But I'm not so sure
That home is a place
That will ever be the same
{Southbound Train by Jon Foreman}