Life Alone

I don't have anything particularly brilliant, insightful, or entertaining to share with you today. It's been a good holiday season, spending time with my extended family. I'm the only one in my apartment and it's been nice. I've gotten to take my time settling in, unpacking and not feeling like my explosion of stuff is annoying or in any else's way. I've cleaned basically the entire apartment. I don't think I've ever cleaned this much in my life. But it's good. It has made this place feel like it's mine and not someone else's house that I'll be living in for the next four months.

What I really wanted to share, though, was about Elijah, you know, from the Bible, 1 Kings. I was reading my bible this morning and I read the classic story of God not being in the wind, earthquake, or fire, but in the gentle whisper. (Technically, it doesn't say that God was in the whisper, but Elijah's reaction would tell us otherwise.)

This time of life has been an interesting one for me. Graduation is quickly approaching and EVERYONE, it seems, is required to ask me what I'm doing after I graduate. I don't know the answer to that question. I don't want to talk about it with people, whose opinions I don't want. I thought going to DC would help me answer all these big life questions, but all it did was give me more.

What Elijah has to do with my life, right, that's my point. Ok, well, I've been waiting for God to show up in an earthquake. I want something big and definitive. It might be crazy, but I'll be so sure of it that it won't matter if it's crazy. Unfortunately, as Elijah's story show's us, God doesn't always act in big earthquake shaping ways. The small whisper that has been spoken to my heart for about a month now is to go to some latin america country for a few years. It's small, gentle, not in any way a sure thing. But what is my faith if I never act in a way that requires it? I'm trusting that this whisper is God, that he will guide my steps down a path he's already prepared for me that I simply cannot see yet. The story of Elijah was just what I needed.

Thank you, God, for giving us your word that it might speak to us just as we need it to. Thank you for the way you whisper to my heart and show it what is right before my rational mind recognizes it. May you continue to grant me a willing heart and spirit to pursue you wherever you take me. I love you, Daddy. Amen.