We're Going To Need Some More Post-It Notes

*****

When I came home from Austria, in December of my junior year of college, I brought back so many things: a postcard from Lisieux, a little wooden box from Poland, a rosary from Rome. But the one thing I didn’t have anymore was the hand-in-hand dream I had flown over with that August: deep young love, early graduation, marriage, a family. I was going to have to come up with a new plan.

Three or four weeks into that spring semester, I got roped into a lunch with the Board of Trustees (you know, model student and whatnot), and at some point the kind lady sitting next to me asked me what I was studying. Politics, politely, and then because she was genuinely interested; I have a somewhat absurd affinity for the Constitution. And what did I intend to do after graduation? Oh, a Ph.D., maybe, I heard myself say; I’d love to study more, and write, and I think I would like teaching a lot.

Huh.

*****

It’s never seemed fair, actually. So many people long to travel and never get the chance; and I, who would have been perfectly content staying close to home, reading books and running by the river in a small town in Michigan for the whole length of my days, am forever being called away. College 1500 miles away from home; four months in Europe; intermittent travel to Boston, Philadelphia, New York, California, Quebec; a summer in Pennsylvania; fall in Colorado; spring in DC. The moving, the changing, pushing, spinning world—it never seems to stop pulling on me.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful. These are great opportunities and I appreciate them. Truly!

Did that sound convincing? Because sometimes I’m not grateful. Sometimes I just want the change to stop.

*****

It is so hard to see into other people’s lives; to look at their circumstances and gauge their personalities and really understand them; to know their hearts; to suffer in their struggles and rejoice in their triumphs and perceive, with clear honest eyes, the men and women we walk alongside—or brush past, mostly—in the long weary days. How terrifying, too, to turn toward the seer, to pull aside the veil protecting all that matters very most to the tender tentative wary heart deepest inside and take the chance that the one who looks will see, will know and not recoil at what he finds. More precarious still is the attempt to take hold, gently, of the frail fragile inwardness and bring it out, in small single words and long faltering sentences, to be seen and heard and known by whoever might chance to pass by.

And yet…and yet…isn’t that what we crave, in the quiet secret depths? To open the doors of our inmost selves and be known, exactly as we are, with our ugly cracks and our crazy sky-blue dreams and all of our love, so much love, pouring out and overflowing, and to trust that these other beating hearts will not push it away? And the terrible beautiful thing is that it can only be trust, trust instead of mathematical certainty, instead of abstract analytical knowledge. Two and two will always make four but people can only trust.

*****

I have been fighting all of my days to understand, to find a syllogism or a sentence or a word—even just one word. And then one Saturday evening I picked up a book and found this:

Really, when you bury a child—or when you just simply get up every day and live life raw—you murmur the question soundlessly. No one hears. Can there be a good God? A God who graces with good gifts when a crib lies empty through long nights, and bugs burrow through coffins? Where is God, really? How can He be good when babies die, and marriages implode, and dreams blow away, dust in the wind? Where is grace bestowed when cancer gnaws and loneliness aches and nameless places in us soundlessly die, break off without reason, erode away. Where hides this joy of the Lord, this God who fills the earth with good things, and how do I fully live when life is full of hurt? How do I wake up to joy and grace and beauty and all that is the fullest life when I must stay numb to losses and crushed dreams and all that empties me out?

I wake and put the feet to the plank floors, and I believe the Serpent’s hissing lie, the repeating refrain of his campaign through the ages: God isn’t good. It’s the cornerstone of his movement. That God withholds good from His children, that God does not genuinely, fully, love us.

~Ann Voskamp~

*****

This is sometimes hard for me to make people believe: I have tried and failed a lot in a couple dozen of these lightning-fast years. I try and fail at human relationships; I knock on doors that never open; I smile sweetly and juggle torches and maintain the illusion of control for far longer than is good for me or anybody else before I fall hard on my own dreams and my own folly and break, parts of me, and sometimes I think that I never ever want to write another word, never want to be vulnerable to anyone ever ever again.

But even just a few months later I look back and I can see. I can see, with a clarity that ought perhaps to surprise me less than it always does, the unmistakable marks of a faithful guiding hand. I can see the blessing in the broken pieces, the derailed plans that saved me from my own blind willfulness, the flowers that grew in the middle of a desert. And I weep for the people and places I have to leave behind, but the truth is that I know, deep down, why the wildly spinning world is such a pushing pulling place for me. It’s because I need to remember—or learn for the very first time, in the middle of footnotes and post-it notes and beneath the veneer of calm cheery competence—that He has me in the palm of His hand.

*****

You who fear the Lord, wait for his mercy; and turn not aside, lest you fall. You who fear the Lord, trust in him, and your reward will not fail; you who fear the Lord, hope for good things, for everlasting joy and mercy. Consider the ancient generations and see: who ever trusted in the Lord and was put to shame? Or who ever persevered in the fear of the Lord and was forsaken? Or who ever called upon him and was overlooked? For the Lord is compassionate and merciful; he forgives sins and saves in time of affliction.

~Sirach 2: 7-11~

*****

Real love is never safe.

Real love is never safe, and real life is never easy, and sometimes the gifts we ask for vainly in one season are placed at our feet wrapped in shiny gold paper in the peak of another season when the light is different and our dreams have been obscured by busy city life and our first instinct is to count the cost, to think only of the mess that shiny gold paper makes on the living room floor. But then there are these faithful friends who speak simple painful truths with loving words, and there is time to think and wonder, and there is the Gift-giver always there, incapable of turning away, capable only of this perfect faithfulness, and love drives out fear and truth brings freedom, and somehow I am ready to jump again.

I’m going to graduate school.