One year later...

One year ago today, I arrived in Baltimore.


No fixed plans.  No set timeframe.  Open to whatever God wanted. 

Ready for anything.

Now, I knew that this “anything” might be difficult.  Part of me was even eager for the challenge; anxious to be tested, to be grown, to be taught.

I thought maybe the hard part would be a new job, just outside my comfort zone.  Or rewarding but emotionally draining humanitarian work.  Or adjustment to the academic rigors of grad school.  Or moving again, near or far, to a new, challenging calling.  Culture shock.  Compassion fatigue.  Language barriers.  Even plain old fear.

I prepared myself, as best I could.

When the difficulty came, though, it caught me off my guard.  It wasn’t on the list.

It was, in fact, the absence of the list.

Stillness.

…Stillness, I have learned, is difficult.

Stillness is even more difficult when surrounded by ridiculously brilliant and talented people who are launching careers and moving overseas and getting married and being promoted and having babies and graduating with fancy-sounding degrees; when the lives of people everywhere seem not just to be moving, but hurtling, forward.  Past you.

In fact, in some ways, it was—is—more difficult than everything on my list put together.

And I think that is the point.

In this stillness, I can't keep feeling important because of how good my school marks are or how intrinsically rewarding my career is or how clever I feel or how necessary I am to some cause.

All those things are being stripped away, and all my weaknesses and inadequacies laid bare.

And—like when Eustace had his dragon skin torn off of him*—it is terrible, and painful, and beautiful, and good.

Perhaps (I'm beginning to see) this stripping down—this frustrating inability to be important in the world—is the only way I'll be able to see my actual significance, and how unrelated it is to what I'm able to do.

Perhaps, for now, it is only by not going and facing great trials and doing great deeds that I am brought to the end of my strength and forced to rely on God for my every breath—my very self—in ways I couldn't have imagined.

Perhaps it is only in this still and small-seeming life that I can learn that “identity in Christ” is not a fluffy phrase to throw around, but a stunning, vital, from-your-soul-to-your-guts-to-your-fingertips reality that makes the questions of job-title and education-level and humanitarian-ness as fleeting and irrelevant as dust specks.

Stillness is not empty.  It is not insignificant.  

This year was not wasted, nor merely a time of waiting for the “real” things to begin.  It was a time of actively, energetically—albeit sometimes grudgingly—being still.  And God tested me, and grew me, and taught me.  He did stuff.  Good stuff.

It was a very good year.  Difficult, as I expected.  Just not difficult how I expected.  And I 
think that made it even better.

So, now.


One year later.


I find myself still here.  Still in Baltimore.


Still no fixed plans.  Still no set timeframe.  Still (some days more than others) open to whatever God wants.

Ready for anything.

Even for more stillness, I think.

...I wonder, then, which unexpected thing I should prepare not to be prepared for this year...
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* In C.S. Lewis' Voyage of the Dawn Treader