As the end of the school year quickly approaches I find myself more often lost in thought regarding what exactly happened this year. What happened to me? What happened to my friends? What exactly are the implications of this Junior year we all walked?
This is an excerpt from my journal. As the end of this school term unfolds I hope to be able to post a few more of my reflections regarding the impact being an RA has had upon me. I also plan to continue this through the rest of the summer.
I suppose this is a small gift for next years RAs. Hopefully they can catch a glimpse of how impactful their RA year can be.
God's faithfulness...What does that look like through the course of a year? How can God be seen to be faithful within the ways we pray?
...God has been faithful. It never happens quite the way we envision, but God IS faithful.
So many times this year I have clung to that truth and believed that in any given situation that was difficult, God would show up. At times this truth was a harness wrapped around me that could have held a sumo wrestler...other times, this truth was a single thread that was so delicate I feared that to put any more faith against it might cause it to dissolve complete...and the truth would be lost.
The truth of the matter is that God rarely made his prescense known when He DID show up. I wonder if I was looking for some sort of miraculous sign like Moses...a burning bush...at talking donkey...or in my imagination it would usually be one of the busts of Jonathan Blanchard that would begin speaking to me. In the midst of my anxiety, fear, pain, or anguish I would cry and cry for some sort of clear sign that God was there....frankly I can only think of perhaps ONE instance in an entire year where I actually received that sort of visceral contact with God...ONCE...out of the hundreds and hundreds of times I could have used a belay.
But looking back, there are indelible footprints that mark where He stood or clear signs where He intervened and cleared paths...but rarely did He make it absolutely clear where he was present. I think of an encouraging word here or there that was uttered by a fellow RA...a conversation with Kat or Neal...memorable moments that are forever imprinted on my mind and shared with either friends or my comrades....or the memory verse Kat made us memorize that droned within my mind.
All of these memories and moments ping like a sacred echo within my heart...proof that God really does move intimately in the lives of his children.
I think that's the point...the present rarely makes sense, and the future is more often than not simply a dream that we either cling to or run from. The thing about the past is that it has the ability to mark us. And while we have a tendency to focus on the baggage that is tied to the past, we forget to notice the tapestries that our personal history has been weaving. God's all up in there.....
The painter Van Gogh, most well known for "Starry Night," was a painter who attempted to capture what he saw as the "real" behind the real. What he wished to acknowledge was that reality is made up of more than just the physical world we see around us. He tried to capture this essence in the brilliant colors and brush strokes that he used to construct his works of art. In much the same way...we often get caught up in seeing the physical reality around us without acknowledging that this is only part of reality. This becomes especially tempting when we are viewing the present, but if you take the time to dig into your past...dive into places you usually avoid within your own psyche...you might be surprised to find the colors are more brilliant than when you originally observed them...like a Van Gogh painting that attempts to illuminate not only reality, but the truth and substance behind it.
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