Hindsight is Awesome

I wrote this post on Tuesday on a flight between Dallas, TX and Seattle WA.

I’m on my way back to Seattle. School started today, but I was in Kansas with my Uganda friends. One week full of laughter and outrageous stories, deep conversations and deep people. It was a week of challenge, but also one so full of love and care. The love and care of these friends is like nothing I have ever experienced, except for the love of God. It definitely was not what I expected it to be. Then again, I am not sure what I expected it to be.
Having people digging into some of the hardest stories of the past year and having those same people share their own struggles and heartaches was beautiful, but not easy; it was good. I do not even have the words to reflect on the week yet, I think the experiences are too close.
What I do want to reflect on is going back to school. Today I was given some glorious insight into it all. The conclusion: God had a purpose in everything that happened the last 6 months.
I saw that last spring, when I was contemplating dropping out, I had grown apathetic towards learning and that apathy was quickly becoming bitterness. I could have pushed through school and finished by the end of this year, but it would have been with a hard and angry heart. I think God saw this and knew I needed rescue. He rescued me; he gave me the freedom to walk away and then invited me on an adventure. I am an adventure junkie, so of course I accepted the invitation. In the last 6 months I have gotten to live in different places near the ocean, to experience different communities and families, to be welcomed into a different family and loved so completely by them. I also studied. I ate up books by well known theologians like Henri Nouwen, Richard Foster, Tolkien and Eugene Peterson. I got to study at my own pace and decide what it was I wanted to get out of these books. Friends, I loved it. Today my friend reminded me of just how much I love to learn and study. I even wrote papers about what I read! God must have seen my heart turning hard and bitter and also known how much I love to learn and study, and he knew he had to do an intervention. He loves me too much to allow my heart to be hardened towards something I love. It took six months, but I got a glimpse of the journey today and received a new perspective of renewal and a second chance to really enjoy learning in the community of SPU.
I don’t think I could have received this joyous gift unless I had spent a week debriefing the hard stuff and allowing my IMME friends to love me. Without the background of love and a supportive community I think I would have hated admitting that I love learning so much and that I might be getting excited about school tomorrow.
This week I didn’t feel pressured to sound ok with what happened in San Diego. It was ok to be upset, to question God and his intentions, to wonder if hope was real and if happiness was possible. It was ok to sit in those hard questions and have no answers, because none of us had any. We were all wondering the same things; the last year has been hard for all of us. Knowing it wasn’t just me who asked these questions and doubts was healing and freeing. It gave me the freedom to look closer and listen to what they all had to say with an open heart. It allowed me to really hear and understand my friend today.
I don’t know what tomorrow will bring. Sitting in classes again, reading over syllabi, knowing I will somehow accomplish every assignment listed; will I be panicked again? Will I remain excited to learn? Will my heart be flooded with apathy and bitterness? Somehow, I have hope within me. Maybe I will panic, maybe I will feel overwhelmed and terrified of all I have to do. My hope isn’t in me. My hope is in God. Today I got a hindsight view of the deep love he has for me and the creative ways he cares for my heart and heals my soul. I guess I am raising an Ebenezer tonight and proclaiming hope and love I cannot understand and choosing to trust God because till now he has cared for me, even when it didn’t look like he was.