Today is the most beautiful day Seattle has had since I have been here. And an unexpected day at that considering it's November. With this unexpected weather comes some unexpected realities of my time here.
This is not the place I emotionally thought I would be in after six weeks of living college life, not the place I at all imagined. When the plane landed I was crying. I was terrified that I wouldn't be able to handle life with all the scars I brought with me and without all the support and love I was leaving behind. My first prayer here was a plea to God to heal me and make me a useful tool for Him. I wanted to be a part of the world change my college talked and raved about and I was scared it just wouldn't be right.
All the dreams I had imagined about college were quickly shattered. Nothing traumatic happened, nothing terrible was done to me; I found myself having trouble with leaving my community behind. I found that my fear of finding nearly no one to connect with was indeed coming true and that the emotional wounds I had in California were the same wounds that were with me in Seattle. I was emotionally exhausted and all I wanted was to go home. I missed my community and I hated it here. I felt as if every friendship was a superficial "hi" to avoid awkwardness and have someone to eat dinner with and that was the extent to how deep they went. I missed the comfort of home.
It wasn't until about two weeks ago that it hit me. I have never felt so close to God. The wounds I thought would take years to heal were gone and the peace I had was the best I had felt in years, possibly my life. Out of my struggling and pain and vulnerability I was forced to surrender everything over to God. Not in the way that I merely tell God I'm surrendering and still attempt to take control over every aspect of my life I deem important. No, actually giving God the reigns on my life, actually giving up and telling Him I suck at handling my life and I don't even want to piece it back together. Completely surrendering. Trusting that His ways are a hell of a lot better than what I can only begin to fathom, having full faith that God will come through and it will be glorious. Every. Time. I suppose I couldn't do that until I was plopped in a foreign place with pretty much no one for support and no one that needed my support. Usually my problem with surrendering is that I feel so many people rely on me for things, that surrendering would be giving up on them. In my mind it became an issue over not only letting myself fall apart but feeling like letting things go would fail other people. I never trusted that God had them like he had me. I never fully felt God as my safety net. I never knew and never would have if I had stayed home.
So here I am. Six weeks later. It's like I had been living on a map so marked up with directions and highlights and marks that I had no idea where to go. And coming here I feel as if God has taken that map away and told me just to be. The last six weeks here have been incredibly hard and if I had it my way they would not have gone as they did. The feelings of alienation, of loneliness would never have settled with me. Yet in my unhappiness with my surroundings I realized God had blessed me with specific things that had totally healed and reshaped me when I was here. In the hardness of life, in the stripping of everything I held close, the Father began to show me how he loved me, the reality of relying on everything except him, and how worth it I am for him. Never in my life have I felt really worth being pursued by God. And in one sense none of us are worthy, but in another I see that he chose me. I, for once, truly see that he loves me and I haven't earned that. Being a support for all the people that I love, being there for others, trying to be a Christ follower has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he loves me and loves me unconditionally. I don't have to do anything. As many times as I had heard that, it was never real to me until now. And how could it have been? In the comfort of home I had distractions, years of patterns and excuses and routines that shielded me from seeing the realities of God's love for me. Here is downright hard, but there's growth. It's raw, it's difficult, it involves a lot of uncertainty, but it's good. God is good.
