100 years...


I realized something today, while driving past the rainbow umbrellas at the corner fruit stand on Loyola Street and listening to "100 Years." It has been too long an interlude since that song actually meant something to me. Perhaps I no longer listen to it because when I do, that sense of Romantic nostalgia is gone and all that is left in its place is the desire to feel the way I once did when I tuned my ear to listen.


It has only recently occurred to me that I have given up much of myself in an effort to "serve His Kingdom," but sadly, I have given up the wrong self. I have idolized that which ought not to have been idolized and have misplaced my faith, never knowing. Through the roughest sanctifying process I have ever been through, God is teaching me my value in being His and His alone. This is what it means to grow; this is the pain of letting go.



I've been looking at my life through a rather critical lens lately, wondering how and when I became too busy to write, when I ever chose to let beauty pass before me without reconciling it somewhere so I could examine it later and commit it to memory, or how I ever allowed creation, poetry, art, humanity and salvation be lost on me when it came time to remember and write about them. I feel like a character in a Stuart Dybek short-story- as though I'm walking down the street behind my former selves, all of us falling in historical order- my sixteen year old self, my twenty year old self, my twenty-five year old self. We're all walking down that lonely road home, hoping for a life we don't dream will fail.


In any case, this self-preservation quest/quarter-life crisis/first real right of passage is causing me to write again, and to remember the things of old that first made me want to seek truth. The good news is that I know I'm not alone in this- this feeling of inadequacy at 25. It just seems to be such a placeless notch on the time continuum- old enough to be held responsible for things not turning out the way one thinks they should, yet too young to have it all figured out, although my mother would say "you'll never have it all figured out." And the odd thing- this season of self-seeking isn't separate from my knowledge of sovereignty, just a weird grey area that causes me to think. And to pray.


Regardless, I have the Hope of the world and know that even in drought, joy still comes. A friend told me the other day that she's been here before. "That song will mean something to you again. And if it doesn't, pick another one that does," she said.


"Yeah, but what if I never feel that way again? What if it's lost on me forever?"


"I promise that it's not. You'll be happy again. Just give it some time."


So that's what I'm trying to do- give it some time. I've decided to take a summer sojourn (definitively, a sojourn means to stay for a time in a place; I think this idea is lovely) and remember the things that once meant something to me- like the Frio when we were young and the world unfurled like a red carpet before us, or what we all experienced but never spoke of when we ventured in the French Quarter, trailing the Mississippi and lace behind us when we came back to Texas, Cecil on the couch between poetry and architectural renderings, running through the fountain the night Bear left, New York at the change of the season and the magic of Paumanok, the color of the moon the night we left Egypt, my last conversation with Alex- "You know I love you, right?"- "Yes, Melly, let's run!"-London in the rain with my sisters, holiness on the Nile River the first time Cairo ever heard "God of the City,"--everything we lost when we left South Congress, and the perpetual feeling that something significant was left behind somewhere, or that something was lost in translation as I leapt from my formative years to now...