I'm listening to snow melt and drip down rain gutters on this quiet Sunday afternoon. Although I've been counting for most of the semester, I'm coming to the realization that in just 6 or 7 short weeks, these last demands of school will conclude and life will be different. Despite this continual onset of realization concerning the transition that stands before me, I am learning that perhaps I ought not set my heart and mind so firmly upon my own ideas about what life looks like beyond the short threshold.

It feels that these last few weeks have been heavy with change and heavy with the voice of the Spirit within my heart. My student teaching placements are set and the personal decisions accompanying these somewhat definitive arrangement are far from determined. The radius of possibilities is vast and so are the questions about where to plunk down in their midst. Places to live for free and places to live for a small fortune and choices about family and friends and aloneness and relationships that I do not yet have any hint of and yet know I will quickly be in need of. And then there is the whole matter of getting too far ahead of myself.

I've been thinking a lot about this time in my life, being 22, being surrounded by friends (of all sorts of ages) who feel lost in purpose. And although I have a somewhat clear path ahead of me, the generalities are the only real guides in my case. The world is still fairly open and I begin to wonder what sort of life there is to be pursued outside the constructs of university life. The 9-5 life that is kind in its stability but dangerous in its potential for stagnation.

I've been thinking a lot about who I used to be and I've caught myself reflecting on whether or not my value has increased or decreased in the process of the last four years. I've been attempting to write essays about a spiritual and personal life that feels as though it has been ravaged by the daily shift of personality change. I've gone from child to student to artist to painter to this thing they call pre-service teacher, all in the context of this square mile. And I've been shaped and formed by this institution, I've been molded towards this end and then wonder what to do when friends ask me not to be that person in the context of our relationship.

I feel like things were a lot more clear a few years ago. And now they are complicated and I'm different today than I was yesterday and I find myself longing for roots. I'm ready for the day when things become more clear in retrospect. I'm ready for the day when I don't see so much of a stranger when I look in the mirror upon awakening.

Personal change is a funny thing. One moment you feel like your normal self and then the next moment you are wondering where your old self went while admiring aspects of a new face. Some parts of you become unrecognizable, other parts in which you placed so much stock are buried or erased, and you see in yourself a developement of something else that is some sort of synthesis of it all. Or so you hope.

It is difficult not to hang on to who you were and what you had a few days ago. It is difficult when you realize that you don't think in exactly the same ways and sometimes it is sad when you realize that you've left some old part of yourself on the side of the road along the way. It is difficult navigating a new body, a new brain, a new heart, while also navigating realtionships and rush hour traffic.

So I've been thinking and praying a lot about taking things one day at a time. Stopping and asking the Father for directions for the self that I am today. It takes a lot of grace and trust when you inhabit a changing self. You hope and pray that someone else is in control of this spinning mess.

 
 
 
 

A lesson in accepting people and things just the way God made them (even if it wouldn't be my way of choosing them). Things feel different again. I've been doing a lot of thinking about this blog and the fact that I don't seem to have the stream of thoughts to record here that I used to. I've wondered if I've grown out of the purposes that writing here used to fulfill. I've wondered if the loss of depression has led to the discontinued need to write here. I don't know. Regardless of all of these things, I do find myself with something to write here today.

It has been quite a different school year, but an even different-er semester. I'm to the point of feeling ready to emerge from the cocoon dutifully called "school" into a different life. I've been reminded, however, in the last few weeks of the eminent change and uncertainty that I've been ignoring with a personal sense of control I like to misguidedly apply to all elements of future life. I hear the voice of reality calling me a bit louder each day out of my illusionistic stupor. Change is coming, I hear it whisper, and it is not going to be controlled by you.

Yesterday I met with a teacher in Longmont to speak about a student teaching placement in her classroom. This location, this teacher, this school would not have been something I would have chosen on my own, but seems to be a place that I can grow and learn. Things felt good. I could see myself transferring my settled life to this place, finding an apartment or some space to put a bed and couch and table and making a new life there.

And then I drove home, opened my computer to greet the awaiting email from a possible part-two placement in Loveland, a good 40 minutes away from placement #1 and a good much too close to the place I was hoping not to be that close too. Within an instant of reading the words "Mary Blair," my plans changed. Hope you like commuting and temporary housing that other voice said. Things don't always go the way you think they should.

Change is rolling in like gray thunderheads. I see them coming, but the magnitude of the storm is yet to be determined. Friendships are changing. I'm clenching my stubborn little fists around keeping things the same, keeping people where I want them to be.

I've been thinking a lot this semester about realtionships. Relationships with people who are different from me. Relationships with people that take work and acceptance and understanding. Relationships that require a daily reminder to myself that the acceptance of others does not determine my worth. Daily working through the reality that just because someone thinks slightly differently that I do does not make either of us less important or more right. I've been struggling with the butting heads and clashing opionions. My easy friendships are absent and the difficult ones, although no less beautiful or important, have defined much of this season. I'm realizing my need to accept people as they are, even if I don't get it, and to accept myself, even when it feels like nobody else gets me.

I don't know what this next season will hold. I do not know where I will be, what my environment will be like or if I'll even have a say in the furniture of my life. But I cannot help but listen to the sense that I may be asked to give some things up, to give some things away, to let go of a lot of things. As I put red ink down on creamy paper surrounding these thoughts, I could not think of the Isrealits reminder, "Our fathers were wandering Aramaics." I couldn't help but conjure images of the wilderness along 287 and the small neighborhoods along the way that appear lonely and isoloated now and long drives ahead of me.

I realize that I've been applying my belief in God's provision to my own plans. The last couple of days, however, have opened my eyes to the reality that I am purusing a life in which He is the leader, and my life is found inside of his heart. And perhaps I am being led into the wilderness and He holds his hand open to recieve the sense of security that I can create and maintain so he can give me something better.