I’ve taken a few short vacations this summer. Each time I’ve returned home to be overwhelmed. Often I’ve been overwhelmed by all the little things I need to be getting done for the Race, but as the summer has progressed I’ve gotten more and more comfortable in the roles I’m playing and the relationships that are developing here at home. Tonight I realized how much this new little life is weighing on me. I’ve known for a long time that I fall in love easily and I think that is precisely what is happening in my relationship with God this summer. God’s been giving me small pictures of a new direction with Him, and I want to take them all on at once. When you’re all too ready to give your heart away, it only takes a small vision of what some kind of love could be and you’re running with it. Over the past few years I’ve been in a season of life where I was looking for love, fulfillment, and direction in some fairly dark places (dark in that they weren’t guided by God’s leading). Consequently I was backed into some pretty dark corners, the paths out of which required some really painful healing.
So at 8:45 this evening I was laying in my bed listening to Corey Smith and then the Newsboys trying to decide what to do next, figuring it was too early to try to go to bed (especially since I started the day in Chicago where it’s an hour earlier). Then the words came to me, “I feel like my heart is being pulled in ten different directions right now.” When I thought of doing missions work after graduation, it seemed like an attractive option because it was an easy way to escape life and run away from the world for a year. That escape was in turn an opportunity to try to discern what God was really doing, if anything, in my life right now. This trip became the one and only thing I was really concerned about, and I liked that. Since I’ve been home, though, God has been giving me plenty to be attached to. At Training Camp (sort of the climax of the story of this summer) God started to give me a picture of what everyday life can look like when we submit every day to His Spirit and His leading. Ironically, my encounter with the Spirit showed me how much I really can be pouring my heart into so many areas, not just the Race. So now, all of a sudden, my heart is being pulled in ten different directions.
I think old me would fall in love with all ten directions and try to pour my heart into all of them at once. New me tries to be more patient. I’ve seen a lot of possibilities for life, and life to the full, here at home. Still I know that to really be able to pour all of me into them I need to take a year to learn to love, to be loved, and to be healed. After years of giving my heart away to a lot of things at the smallest inkling, I need to choose a little more carefully and be healed of what all those dark corners did to me. Only then can I return to discern and pursue God’s calling(s) on my life.
Still it’s hard. The other day I got real pensive and started trying to sort out why God didn’t just let me do what I had originally intended and take a real chill summer to let life settle out and just pour my whole self into this trip – no reservations. I was asking him why he was giving me all these life things that are going to be so hard to leave behind. Then it hit me: precisely because they will be hard to leave behind. I’ve been all too ready to give my heart away to Him. I’ve been falling in love far too easily. When I step on that plane on the 28th, He wants me to trust Him. Not only to trust Him that our trip will work out in front of me, but also trust Him that the plans and relationships I’m leaving behind are in His hands. I love to love, so much so that at times I think the world runs on my love, forgetting that whatever I pour out only came from Him to begin with. I never anticipated that there would be so much loving for me to do here at home. Now that I’ve seen it, I can’t stand the thought of leaving it all for a year.
So now I have a nice little challenge over the next four weeks. I need to start trusting that the work He has started here will be completed in His time and in His plan. Only in His time will my heart and the hearts of the world I’m in be fully ready for me to fall in love with it all. Only when I allow myself to fall into His love, will God let me be ready to fall in love with all He has for me.
