This morning, around 4 AM, I was lying in a tent in the picturesque lakeside site of a campground in Georgia. It was approximately 37 degrees Fahrenheit, and my feet were cold. My arms were warm; my legs were comfortable. My head was even relatively warm. But no matter how many times I woke up during the night, no matter how I tried to shift in my sleeping bag, no matter what I wrapped around them, my feet were still cold.
And around 4 AM, there was this irrational thought in my head that my feet were never going to stop being cold. That there would never be another time in my life when my feet were warm.
I have been in that place before.
Not that lakeside campground, but the place where the moment seems like the only thing that is ever going to matter. Where cold feet or pain or suffering or tears or heartache or mourning or frustration or stress or tiredness seem endless. Where I cannot see life beyond the circumstances of right now.
One of those times was a similar, but a little more extreme, experience on the first night of training camp before I went on the World Race. I arrived a day late because of my roommates wedding, and after a long night of traveling and approximately two hours of sleep, followed by a long, emotional day that included meeting about fifty people with whom I was going to spend the next year of my life, half of our squad “lost their luggage.” And we came together and bonded and shared our things.
That morning, around 4 AM, I was lying in a tent in the picturesque hills of a park in Tennessee, rationalizing and plotting to retrieve my sleeping bag off of the girl with whom I was sharing my tent without her waking up. Because it was cold. It was really cold. And I was in the midst of my second night of insufficient sleep.
In my haze of shivers and the kind of cold that reaches the bone, I could not remember a time before the frigidity of the night, and I could not see a life beyond the bitter darkness.
There was a moment in seventh grade, running that first mile in gym class. Another sleepless night in Thailand while recovering from food poisoning and dehydration. Another time in the Philippines, squished into a seat with three people on a bus that could have doubled as a sauna. An all-nighter alone in my apartment junior year at the University of Evansville the night before I got to go home for Thanksgiving that produced the only D-paper I ever submitted.
Someone accuses me of something I did not do. Something does not work out the way it supposed to. Something I have said is wildly misunderstood. I make a mistake. I hurt someone I love. I forget to do something I promised I would do. Someone rejects me.
Someone misunderstands me.
[Add your own moment that seems like the only moment here.]
The hour I sat in my car grieving the door slamming closed on the job I thought was the most perfect thing that God was using to redeem all of the other doors that had closed before I got a chance to walk through them. The opportunity that I believed God had shaped for me to accomplish the goals I had been working toward. The results of my dedication and work. The thing that made sense.
In those moments, nothing makes sense. It just seemed as if there was no moment that would follow that moment in which things would make sense.
But there was. Life goes on.
Suddenly, I find myself in some future moment beyond that moment. Maybe in my bed, covered by warm blankets. Or sitting by a fire with my feet hanging as close to the flames as I can get without melting the soles of my shoes. Or eating Thanksgiving turkey and mashed potatoes and noodles and pie with my family. Maybe sitting on the couch watching Sweet Home Alabama with my best friend.
Or riding in a rental car along the coast of South Africa with some of the coolest people I never would have known if my foot had not been slammed in the door over a year earlier.
Maybe it does not happen right away. Maybe it takes a few hours of cold feet or a few minutes of breathlessness, feet pounding against concrete, or a night of typing any words that I can get to–please, please, please–just come out of my head through my fingers.
Or a couple of months of disappointment and a few months working a job that I never want to see again.
Life went on. The moments that irrationally seemed like a lifetime within itself were as fleeting as every other breath, every other moment of my life.
And some of those moments make sense now.
Because though the cold feet may last for the night, something new, one of those South-African-cape moments or a sunrise over the lake, is coming with the morning.
