Saturday, September 7, 2013

Cogitationes aestivo

It is late at night, but my mind will not allow me to go to sleep. Thoughts from my past few months keep coming into my head, crying for attention, yet I am too tired to give them the honor they deserve by inspecting them fully. So instead I blog. I write for the untold masses. I muse.

So much has happened to me lately, and I don't know how much I can share. Not that I do not want to share my life with those around me, though perhaps it is useless in this forum. I simply have so many words fluttering around my thoughts and no order in which to place them. Words have always been important to me. The English language, though excruciatingly difficult to sing in, is a sonorous, multi-faceted language. Being a classical vocalist and singing in several languages on a daily basis, I am painfully aware of the many places our mother tongue originated. The elements of French, Spanish, Greek, German, and Latin all combining to form the way most of us in North America and western Europe communicate. All of the intricate pieces which had to come together in order for our language to be exactly where it is today.

As I've begun work on my own new hobby, that of writing a novel or series of novels, I have started by creating maps, sacred texts, character profiles and a language. When I was deciding how my language would sound, I combined the [ʒ] from French with Italianate vowels, Hebraic [χ] and many sounds found within Russian and German and English. I did this to give it a more world-worn sound and, perhaps, a gruffer, more earthy tone as well.

All of this to say, I still have no words to describe my Summer. Here I am, now two weeks into the school year and still no idea how to thank those who need to be thanked, how to mourn new members to my personal family who are now scattered across the nation, or how to explain to everyone around me how much I have really changed. Instead, I have found myself trying harder than ever to fit back into the crowd because I am too frightened to show them the difference the Summer made in my life. The difference that scares me so much, that gives me such drive this school year. I wake up every morning and see my Bible sitting solidly on my shelves from whence it has not moved since being placed there when I moved into my apartment for the year. I see pictures of people who have influenced me more than I ever could know and I feel ashamed that I am not brave enough to continue in the path I saw ahead of me when I was not distracted.

This Summer has left me broken. A wise man once told me that people often think that as you become an older and "wiser" Christian you automatically become holy someday, or life gets easier and you get better each day. He also said that the exact opposite is the truth. That each day one lives in full knowledge of Christ's love and grace, the more we realize how fallen and in need of help we are. And here I am, wanting so desperately to hold my friends close and be in a place that singularly focuses on building others up, where I focused on building others up, where our desires and needs fall far short of those around us. I cannot help but stand in awe of the work that was done this Summer and confusion over how to spread that to people that think they know who I am.

It is one thing to truly understand one's identity. It is another to convince others. That is the journey ahead of me. That is what I am failing to do. That is why I miss my friends and feel torn from them while they live their lives apart from me for this time.

I want to leave you all with one thought. God didn't have to make us. He made us because He wanted to in full knowledge that we would turn from Him because our own wants and needs seemed more appealing than His, but loving us anyway. He loved us so much that He Himself gave up His eternal, ineffable form and took on that of a human. A tainted, mortal/immortal body. That He could live our lives. Know what we know, feel what we feel. Cry, hurt, feel pain, be depressed, but know that He had a place waiting for Himself and for us. He is there, still in human form, though perfected. He is there waiting for us, keeping His Father's judgmental hand at bay, just so we can be there with Him. Forever. So we can live eternally with the one who created us simply because He could.

If you have never heard the Gospel, that's it. God made us and loves us because He could and He wanted to. Nothing more, nothing less. There is nothing we have to do but understand that He died so we would not have to. We are paid for. He made us. We were stolen from us. He bought us back. Thank God He is so gracious. This is how we should live each day, with these thoughts in mind.

I may miss my friends, but God has His plan, and that is rarely the same as my plan. I am content and excited to see what that plan entails.