After these three days end, school will once again consume my entire person-hood for one more term. As those of you who actually still read this no doubt have observed, I haven't been writing as much lately. I myself have wondered why this is, whether it be the lack of adequate things to say, a loss of my reflective self, an increased loss of literate appetite thanks to the overtake of college senior status and an ever-growing desire to sleep more than anything else. I've also wondered if maybe I'm growing out of this blog. Over the last semester, I've experienced, thanks to the wonder of pharmaceutical technology, a freedom from the depression that drove me to write here in hope of refuge from the storm. I've wondered if the thing I set out to do by writing this blog has been accomplished and I've reached many of the ends each of these posts was a prayer for.

It has been four and one-half years since I started covering this black space with these white words. A journey through the conclusion of high school through what is now the conclusion of my undergraduate life. This has been round four as far as the winter break cycle is concerned, and I am tempted to speculate that this has been the most-anticipated one so far, but I'm not sure if that is true. Regardless of its status among previous breaks, I will say it has been one of a great deal of recombination and reflection-- I've felt the importance of taking some extended time to step back and look at my spiritual life and prepare my heart for the year that lies ahead.

For the last few terms, I've had the painful sense of a spiritual shift in my life-- in terms of how my personal growth has been assessed in my younger days, these more recent seasons of this transition they call "college age" are marked with less measurable focus on who I am becoming and more adherence to an increasing need to "get by." The time I used to spend filling journals and reading is now spent writing lesson plans and painting to a deadline. My prayer life occurs occasionally in the shower or on my bike between classes and lunch and usually consists of the words, "help me make it through another day." God isn't the same God I thought he was when I was eighteen and I am not the same person either. Earlier this fall, I wondered if I was still the deep, wise person people told me I was back then when I was a person beyond most my age. I wondered if my life had become shallow and small.

Over the break, the completion of an application for a summer camp counseling job forced me into some serious reflection on the state of my spirit and the disciplines that keep me growing. A few months back, the presentation of the question: "How is your spiritual life," sent me into a panic as I realized that for the sake of appearances, my spiritual life was found at the altar of school-- the all-consuming fire in my life felt like the need to meet deadlines and expectations. But as I sat down to work through the question presented on the application, "What is your relationship with Christ?" I began to realize that it isn't that my soul has shrunken to meeting the expectations of my superiors, but my way of approaching the Spirit of God and his work in my life had simply changed to something less measurable, but far more authentic.

As I wrote my response, I came to the realization that in the last four years, my spiritual growth has shifted from isolated disciplines of solitude and reflection to a communal way of life. As I've prayed for a freedom from guilt and a sense of obligation for the aquisition of acceptance and validation, I've found a life in the arms of a loving and faithful God who is not limited to ink on paper. Not that solitude and the disciplines are not essential means of connecting with the Father, but when we leave behind the need to do these things for our own spiritual satisfaction and seek God where he wants to be found, we crack open a world far beyond our own imaginations.

Sitting down and thinking through the true state of my relationship with the Trininity leaves me only with the pervading reality that God is faithful, that his promise never to foresake perseveres in the midst of the violent shifts that modern life inevitably presents. I began to write the section of my application on "disciplines that keep you growting" with some trepidation-- no longer do I have time for regular journaling, it has been months since I read a good book on theology or "inspiration" on my own, and truth be told-- my bible rarely sees the light of day outside of Sunday. As I mentioned before, my serious times of solitude are the 8-10 minutes in the shower on days I get ahold of my worries for the day or am awake enough to think beyond the selection of clean clothes in my closet. But as I stopped thinking in terms of how I would have proudly presented my spiritual stature in previous years, I realized that osmething far more prevading and powerful now marks my spiritual growth-- community.

It was just a short time before I began writing here that for the first time in my life I heard the message from Genesis 1-- "It is not good for man to be alone." Four and a half-years ago, I entered into this mind-blowing reality that this longing I have to be connected to other human beings is not a right denied to certain people like myself-- we are made for it. And it has been since then that I've been on this quest towards seeing that play out in my life.

Over the past month, I've been keenly aware of how close my life is to becomming one of a full-time teacher. As I go to work every day and see the faces of so many kids that need to be lovingly cared for and brought up in truth, my role of such a mentor in the classroom draws closer and closer in my awareness. Underneath, I've been aware of my calling to teach for my entire life. I have distinct memories of sitting at the small desk in my dad's office, surrounded by rows of music tapes and my aunt's artwork, sticking barbie stickers on green paper thinking to myself, "I will sit at a desk like this as a teacher some day." As a sophomore in high school, at a youth retreat on legacy, I prayed that God would speak to me about the path he would call me to through college. Almost instantly, everything burrying this life-old voice moved to the side and I knew teaching art was the place created for me. It was as though all I had to do was remember.

And so I followed the voice, despite the trepidation at the thought of connecting with children and my overall fear of relationship. I don't know how to do relationship, I wispered to God often. How will this ever work? How can I ever teach if I don't know how to connect to people? But then there was this whole group of people repeating this word over and over again-- community. Community. It was an alluring word, a concept full of mystery and romance. Something I wondered about for myself.

My first year of college, I felt like I messed up a lot of relationships. This community I was looking for in the Body seemed impossible and I was still hard, full of walls to be surmounted. My dreams weren't coming true and I wondered how I could be so full of the quest for community and yet be falling so hard. And then I recieved an invitation. "Come do life with us for a while." Community.

For a long time, I saw the embodiment of community as a group of friends that did things together on Friday night and never left each other out of things and gave each other rides and ate dinner together a lot. A life-long circle of friends that never wavered or shifted. Undying loyalty. So I went, thinking I would find such a circle of friends. And I found myself alone a lot. I did make new friends and we did things together and I spent a lot of days in a row with people. We ate dinner together. But I also got hurt and it was usually messy. And then certain words woke me up to a new reality of what community meant.

My definition of community changed. I realized community isn't a formula fond in certain ancient accounts. It doesn't look like a high school clique and it doesn't solve all of your problems in an instant. And maybe the most important lesson of all is the reality that community is never static and it isn't an unchanging wall of security. Community, I am learning, is an ever-shifting openness to change. Community is bravery and community is the realization that everybody matters. When I make an image out of community, I end up putting walls around things and miss out on the wind that blows through life.

Perhaps one of the greatest lessons I've learned over the past four years is the inevitable tendency for people to walk in and out of your life and the unquestionable need to hold people with an open hand. Best friends forever isn't actually the way community breathes. I like that image-- community is breath. When I read that humanity is created in the image of God and my exeperience tells me no two people are the same, I have to conclude that as a Body, every person moving in and out of the mouth of God as his breath is some manifestation of the life God gives. So, allowing the natural rythm of relational tide to wash over my life is recieving the sustenence God himself gives. We all know that people move in and out of our lives at certain times for perticular reasons.

Along the course of this journey towards life found in community, I've wondered at the paradox between the idea that God is enough and this life supposedly made for community. Growing up as a lonely child, petrified of the damage relationships with other broken shards of people can bring, I maintained a self-sufficient life, relying on my own ability to perform and learn without actual human interaction. I was taught "God is enough," and that my daily routine of discipline must exhibit a spiritual fortitude of epic porportions to by loved by God and accepted in relgious communities. God is enough meant never trust other people to provide for your needs. I lived a black and white life of isolated theology.

However, this idea of God being found in the ebb and flow of faces around me, reconciles this idea afterall. God is enough as he shows himself in the community he has built into our hearts. Our horizontal and vertical lives are not separated. Maybe the verticle isn't quite as high as we thought. My definition of the life God made for our spirits has changed.

Do you ever stuggle through a certain season in life only to step back after the smoke clears and feel the suffen gravity of a shift? In expounding on my practices of personal growth on this application, it occured to me that through the refining fire of time management and submission to the demands of Colorado State University, I've been freed from my isolated sense of religious accomplishment as a mark of spiritual worth into the realization of God in the faces that meet my gaze every day. I don't have time to sit down and read for hours and the pages upon pages I write these days often entail lesson objectives and assessment strategies, but the spiritual encounters that permeate my life are the women I life with, my classmates, and the kids I build relationships with at work. I learn about the person God is making me into as I struggle through how to love my parents, and I do the dishes for the sake of a roommate who enjoys a far-neater house that I am compelled to maintain. My exeperiences of God are no longer limited to the weekly hour I spend with my nose in a book, but permiate moments of despiration when I wonder if I'll ever find the strenght to paint another 15 minutes.

As I near the end of this journey and perpare to enter a new season in life, I can't help but marvel at God's faithfulness. As I look back at the times I grieved my own percieved lack of spiritual accomplishment, I see only an image of the Father holding me close. I've been thikning a lot about Rob Bell's Nooma video entitled "Rain," in which he tells the story of a time he took his son for a walk in the forest when it began to pour a torrential rain. Near the conclusion of the video, Bell contemplates what it would be like for his son to later ask him how he could put him through such abuse. As a father, he says, such a question would be pure heartbreak as this experience was one of the closest moments with his son in his lifetime. "I got to hold you close," Bell says.

Throughout the Christmas season, the concept of story has been on my mind. I've been thinking about the story God had prepared for John the Baptist and the journey many prophesied about Jesus' life. I often think about a talk Francis Chan gave at Mar's Hill sometime ago about this idea of the story God is inviting us into; the portion of his talk that continually comes back to me is his retelling of his own life from God's perspective. I'm going to have this child born to a family who doesn't want him. I'm going to have this child be adopted, only to witness the death of his mother at age 12. And then... I often think about this manner of narrative in light of my own life and imagine God telling my story in much the same way-- he knows it all, and he knows the pain, but it is a beautiful novel in his library of lives.

I began to think back on the last four years and how I find myself in a community now that I felt I've been searching for since the start of my college life, a community I was so close to being a part of but somehow ended up taking a detour to find. A detour that led me to perhaps the greatest pain of my life. The first realization of this thought instatntly brought me to ask why. Why, Abba, would you take me through that road that you knew would end in an experience of such greif? But as I thought about the path my life took there, no cell in my body asks to go back or avoid it. It is a part of me. A gift.

So here I am. In three short days, I will venture once again to rooms full of chairs and tables, I will embark on journeys through books and do a lot of typing on this same keyboard. I will be covered in paint and I will dress professionally. I will be making last preparations before stepping into a classroom all my own, on my own.

But I will go with an awareness of a God who is faithful and a God who only longs to hold me close. I will go armed with the pages of a story that tell of a Father who answered prayer, who healed this broken heart and taught me how to love people, a God who soothed my fears and taught me how to love children. A God who gives me dreams at night about building relationships with children I've yet to meet. A God who has already made this child into someone she only dreamed to ask for. So off I go!