The occasion is also marked by an uncanny freshness that I also likely will not experience for a long time. The end of a hard term followed by the last song of a Spring break that both broke and healed.
Such is an inspiration to write.
Though Spring began a week ago, I had an unexpectedly difficult Spring Break that only just now made me realize Spring. Awkward and difficult as it was, Florida stood to be a delightful opportunity to practice what little grace I have learned, and teach me what still I am struggling with.
Idolatry and pride still loom, I apologize. They were woven into my more "matured understanding of God" and I forgot. I grew complacent, and faced the fallible willpower of me against what real love might teach.
What happened? A season of my life ended, and I mourned it far from home and far from familiar comforts. My faith was shaken, and I realized that as much as I thought I had progressed in understanding Christ, I felt all the way through my heart that much of the faith was being put into another person, and I fell.
What got me through was not my will to be a better person. If anything, trying to be the bigger man in the matter was the worst of it. My willpower had already failed me when I refused to release my expectations of the visit. Those expectations are what spiraled me away from really listening. I would have been lying to say that I was under control. I was not under control.
I was carried away, and given time to be quiet. To talk. To drink. To think. To write.
I am a torn blanket again, cleaning out the bad stitching, hot metal, and broken spiritual bones primed to be set, hit, knit a second time, much in the way I encountered in Ireland, far from home.
Walking away from God, I dwelled in Netflix, round words, and finally trekked through an old high school story written only through old love letters.
One that I hadn't really healed from.
Or moved on.
One that I kind of held to.
I was reminded of how I was, where I had come from. The old love letters from my past relationship spoke to my ego, sure, but it inspired my passion and imagination. I remembered what it was like to be throat-deep in romance and youthful grandeur. I remembered the struggle of disillusionment. I remembered what it was like to think there was nobody else but her.
I saw myself through the lens of someone I connected with and made a commitment to a long time ago. Writing, words, letters, anxieties, joys, lows, highs all were suddenly fresh. So unfamiliar.
So I wrote twelve-something pages of old romantic words mixed with my newly adopted Christian mantras that I so cling to, in hopes to keep to the road God means for me, to shed these old skins in pursuit of new cells.
I wrote to shed, I wrote to grow, to forgive, to move on, but to move forward. I wrote to heal, to finish a clean break, to drill the cavity, to fill it again.
I wrote.
So I'm back in my room again, finally just with God.
I remembered a book my grandma gave me for Christmas:
On the Shoulders of Hobbits
It's an explorative study of God and virtue in the epics set in Middle Earth and Narnia.
I read a few chapters.
The book isn't of high merit or particularly scholarly. I'd spent time reading other speculative or academic books that offer a more personal perspective on scripture and been satisfied and not satisfied.
What was different about the author of Hobbits, what brought me to a fresh spring-feeling about God, is the author's love for both novelists, stories, narratives, characters, and worlds, and how he finds God's love there, deep in the imagination of wizards and talking trees and mountains.
What touched me was his wonder at the worlds.
I'd forgotten what it was like to wonder about fantastic places and stories and good characters.
I've existed outside of such things, between maintaining relationships and reading scripture,
I'd forgotten the value of wonder.
And now, uniquely hot from heartbreak,
[which I celebrate! Grief shed is my stamp of the genuine love we swam in over letters and phones]
I find myself delightfully vulnerable in welding my old joy (grown tired, hurt, and dismayed in the past week) in the pursuit and love of God deep into this rediscovery of stories.
The rediscovery of stories.
Of fantasy.
Of imagination.
Of narrative.
Of wonder and whimsy and joy beyond our bounds!
At the top of a new term, my skin warm from the lingering of spring break's last sunset,
I find peace in remembering stories, this medium by which to discover and share God's love amidst studies, apartments, cars, keys, and yaw.
An answered prayer.
I'm going to protect and grow my imagination again.
This time, with a greater understanding of its purpose in understanding life better through my pursuit of love, these things greater than me.
As I find peace, and I offer it to you.
