As you know, I’m always in some sort of existential crisis. I am! I really am. My sister’s favorite statement to me as a child (besides “Please stop talking so much!”) was “You need to stop thinking so much.”
In my twenties, one of my wise mentors from Camp Greystone told me, “You are making life too hard, Heather.”
In other words, I needed to relax and ride life’s waves a little.
The Italian Mama and I just recently joked about how much we have to understand what stuff means. We have to sit around and philosophize about life’s deepest questions all the time. There isn’t enough cannoli in all the world to fuel our thinking about life’s major questions: What am I doing? Why am I here? What does this mean? What does it mean?!
It’s how God made me. I must do this kind of thinking. The downside of this way of being is that I always feel a little off-kilter, like a tipping sailboat. I always feel an undercurrent of homesickness, a not-rightness, a longing, a nostalgia for something I never had but know is there or about to happen. I feel tossed about in the breakers.
It’s unsettling how unsettled I am inside.
It’s good and bad; the beauty and joy of deep thinking brings along with it the dark things, like waves on the sea that bring gorgeous shells but also bone and shards of glass.
The only thing that comforts me is a Bible verse buried in Psalm 138. It’s just this: “God will fulfill his purpose for me.” And another? Ephesians 1:11 that God “works out everything in conformity with the purpose of His will.”
When I choose to believe these two verses, I feel the sailboat inside anchoring. I feel the tide delivering the peace and wonder of something like golden seahorses and starfish, purple sea glass, and rainbow abalone. God will make me who I am supposed to be, and everything is happening just as it should happen.
I can sit back and worship God for whatever He delivers into my hands, whether broken or whole, crashing or calm. What does it all mean? It means there’s a great tide of His love that will always, always carry me home.
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A reminder that I am not alone. I wish I could joine you and the Italian Mama for a conversation. I treasure the ones that I have with friend now about the meaning of everything.