one. year.

 

So. today marks the one year anniversary of, now looking back on it, one of the worst days of my life. SO. MUCH. unknown. The one thing that I did know last year was that I was leaving my family, my sister, my best friend, and my friends for a year to be with people that, well, I really didn’t know at all. What I didn’t know was that a year later when I would return home to my family, my sister, my best friend and my friends, that day would also be one of the worst days of my life. Because while living with these people, whom ONE YEAR AGO I didn’t know, for a year…I now consider them family. And I miss them all dearly. Yeah. I miss you all dearly. Like so much miss. But so much love. Soooooo much.

 

After a month or so of having “good” days and “bad” days, a new house, not a lot of internet (funny enough), and lots of catching up to do…I feel I am able to blog. (or at least…a little more able.)

Of course my first thought was..wow. what do you blog about after a year like that one? And well. Let’s just be honest…I have no idea.

But I found this L O N G quote from CS Lewis and I quote him a lot…but its because he puts into words the way my soul feels. So maybe that’s why I yell and cry and ooh and aah and pass out when I read some of the things that he writes. And here is one that, well, reminded me of my longing…and why I am still “longing..”

“In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you-the secret which hurts so much that you (I) take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things-the beauty, the memory of our own past-are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

 

Of course. Nothing in this world will satisfy. Only Jesus can satisfy.

my hope is in that.

So after a year of traveling. Of seeing things that I never dreamed of seeing. After falling in love with Jesus. With His creation. With His people. I am continually realizing that it truly is only Him that can satisfy. That He really is all the beauty in the world. That is He is so much beauty that all we have now are little glimpses of His beauty.

Anyway.  I don’t really know much to say. But that it is a day by day. Hour by hour. Minute by minute sort of thing. Taking it in. 

And not even being able to fathom that it has been a year when it hardly even feels like it started….