Only One Thing

I think there comes a time in a woman's life when she realizes she must give herself fully to something. I have no doubt men come to the same conclusion as well, but there is some especially dreadful feeling that fills a woman's heart when she realizes that despite all her efforts to love everything and everyone, she can only let one thing fully into that complex, beautiful heart of hers, and that one thing, whatever it may be, will slowly consume everything she has.

The more I ponder about what true love and passion are, the more I feel a deadly lack of that true emotion. We want adventure, we want wonder, we want to leave a mark after we are gone and yet, somehow, the courage and emotion and confidence required to accomplish such things we cannot find in ourselves. It's really a dreadful, empty feeling. And we realize then that whatever we decide to give ourselves to, we have to embrace it until it makes its home in our body and soul and can never leave, or the change we want will never occur.

I turn 20 in the month of May this year, and I am more than curious as to how the person I am will change over the course of the next few years, let alone the next decade. Will I remain a free spirit, wandering the lesser-travelled paths of the world, learning the nuances of the human condition? Or will I, as my grandmother puts it, "get a stable job" and live not unlike everyone else in middle class America, singing in church every Sunday but always wondering what radical things are happening in Mozambique, or Ukraine, and wonder why I am not there to witness them? I hope it is not the latter. The latter, at least, does not run in my family.

But here now, I have neglected to tell you the one thing that has started to irreversibly consume me. For some, it happens like a lightening strike, frying their bones and making them unfit for anything else. For me, it's a slow awakening, like someone who's been in a coma in a hospital bed for a long time. I only remember uselessness from my dreams, a shadow. I have learned to blink and breathe air into my lungs again. I am learning to talk. Soon I will walk, slowly, stiffly, but surely. Then I will run, jump, laugh.

Eventually, you must give yourself to something. For me, it is as much given as it is compelled from me, the only plausible option. For when you know of the only Way to love, you take it. You darn well live it. And eventually, nothing else fits in your heart, but you really don't care in the end. That is the beauty of the Divine Love of God.

I guess I started this blog to tell you about my adventures I've had and will have. I started it this way to establish that Jesus is through and in everything in my life, so naturally he's a prerequisite for all strange but lovely things that occur.

Love through me, Love of God;
Make me like thy clear air
Through which, unhindered, colors pass
As though it were not there.

Powers of the love of God
Depths of the heart Divine,
O love that faileth not, break forth,
And flood this world of Thine.

-Amy Carmichael, "If."