January 25, 2009

Waiting. Waiting for a sign to show us our way this summer, my life is nothing less than consumed with three things: eating, sleeping, and checking the weather for some excitement. Satisfaction is hard to find, and a meaning for life is as dead as this winter feels. It’s winter outside, and it’s winter in my life.

Extraordinary feels far away, but everything is super-sized all around me, offering money and objects that please me and trends that will be buried this time next year. Grocery stores overwhelm me with their endless amounts of food and products, and at the restaurant I work in, food is thrown away in abundance because it’s against the law to take it home, for fear it will be used to feed hungry mouths outside the restaurant walls. What a waste and what a tragedy.

I want something so much more than all this abundance and waste. I want greatness and usefulness. I know where that lies, but I can’t seem to get there because I’m in this massive hole waiting for an answer as to where my life is going. There are walls all around me so I can’t go anywhere and I can’t start anything because I know I’m leaving soon, and I can’t stand the thought of starting something good and then leaving it behind. Or maybe I’m afraid to start?

I resolved to read the entire Bible this year, three or four chapters a day, and five on Sunday’s. For the first part of January, I was so excited about it, and always wanting to get into it. Slowly my excitement dwindled and now I haven’t read it in a week. I’m going to read the Word tonight. It’s a part of the Lord I want to learn more about, because He knows Everything there is to know about me.

I’ve said to the Lord: Anytime, Anywhere, Anyplace. He knows that I liked to plan and map things out….and although I love change itself, I don’t like unexpected change. I don’t want to make a habit out of bossing around the Lord, so I can’t come to expect He’ll do things my way. He knows where my heart is and I’m sure He’s waiting patiently to direct me. However, I’m stuck here in this winter waiting impatiently for an answer that I expect. What am I supposed to do with myself in the meantime?

If all there was in life was eating, sleeping, and checking the weather, we would be bored out of our minds. I’m bored already and it’s been a day. I think that Satan drives us to boredom for fear that we’ll experience something greater, more impulsively grand than just the daily grind of our American lives.

I desire to experience beauty again. That’s why I’m gun-ho about this road trip to Arizona with Callie. It’s all I can think about because I want to drive all night, sleep in the car, look up at the stars, know that the Lord created them for my pleasure, look up at mountains that remind me how very small and insignificant I am, experience the dryness of the desert just so I can feel my body again, drive through towns and cities that tell me there’s a huge world out there, and instead I’ve allowed myself to become bored in Springfield- right in the middle of a grandiose country that varies from coast to coast. I am so tempted to wake up at 5 a.m. tomorrow morning and drive to Colorado and back in the same day. EXPERIENCE!!! That’s what my heart is crying out for. Even BAD experiences, things to remember and discuss! I’m looking forward to this road trip so I can do away with my preconceived notion that everything must be planned out and perfect, and when things change, I want to learn to roll with it instead of getting thrown off balance and getting upset. I wish to be more laid back and the strong, silent type.

I always think that anywhere else is better than where I am. A few years ago back in Highland, I just knew that when I went away to college, that new place would be better, more exciting, more opportune, than where I currently was. Now, I’m four years older and convinced that anywhere else other than here (or Highland) will be better than this. Yet I’m feeling called back to the very place I escaped four years ago to come to this place. Maybe the Lord wants to teach me that every place is kind of the same…and it gets dull after a while, and you get to know people and realize that relationships also reach a certain point… and that leaving people and places behind doesn’t mean you’re above them or better than them…but that you’re just somewhere different now, and you’ll be somewhere different over and over again but never get to that perfect place that never gets old.

It feels good to think after experiencing a day where my husband was doing the thinking and I was doing the sleeping to escape the thinking. But the thinking his come, and I am glad.