Amy Hit The Atmosphere

One of my favorite Counting Crows song has a line that says,

"There has to be a change, I'm sure. Today was just a day fading into another, and that can't be what a life is for."

Lately all of my todays have been fading into yesterdays, into a long, blurred line of days and weeks, and I don't like it. The past week has seemed incredibly long, and yet when I try to think back about each individual day I find that I can't separate one from all the others.

I watched a movie not long ago about Dorothy Day, and after I cried my way through it I was left with a gnawing, insatiable hunger to do something, almost anything, besides what I'm doing now. Because when I look at what I'm doing, I don't really like what I see. I'm living at home with my family, enrolled in community college, working a couple of jobs just to fill up the tank of my car, hanging out with old friends and going to my old church, just as if the last two years had never happened.

I live in the past so often. I think back to India and the kids I love there, Kuala Lumpur and the friends I made, Thailand, Phimpa, and the staff at The Well, and I wish I were any of those places instead of an old, colonial house in a little New Hampshire town. I watch other people leave for amazing trips all around the world, and I stay home and don't do anything. It seems that everyone I know is moving into an active community, traveling the world, going on excellent adventures, feeding the poor, and loving the unlovable, and I am not.

And that just "can't be what a life is for". At least not my life.

But what if it is? What if what God wants from me is what seems the hardest right now, to live contentedly at home without much direction and just do what he's put in front of me here? Even that sounds good, but in practice it's much harder. It's hard to live in the present moment when I don't feel like Dorothy Day or Mother Teresa. It's hard to remember to appreciate the beauty that God has added to my life, and love the people around me day in and day out. It's hard to admit that two years out of high school I still don't know what I'm doing in life. It's hard to watch my friends get engaged left and right without a guy in sight for me. It's hard to get up in the morning and start another day in a house full of unpacked boxes and disassembled furniture. It's hard to go to work when I'm just counting the hours until I leave again.

It's hard to watch everyone else doing large and beautiful things with their lives when I'm still trying to figure out the next step.

And I wondered the other day as I complained to Jesus about all of this if my life would have turned out differently if I had expected something different. I have never known where I was going in life, never had a boyfriend, never wanted a 9 to 5 job and the American dream. I admired the women I knew that were single and living completely on faith. I expected to go to college without a major,and I'm still doing that. I expected to transfer from one school to another, and sure enough I've done that, and I'll do it again next year. I expect to see at least two of my siblings married before I am, and my younger brother has a serious girlfriend while I am still single. Did I bring this on myself? It seems like I live just looking for the moment when I screw things up irreversibly.

"There has to be a change, I'm sure. Today was just a day fading into another, and that can't be what a life is for."

"If we do not have peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other." Mother Teresa said that, and I absolutely love it. If I do not have peace, perhaps it's because I have forgotten that my life is not just mine to do with what seems best right now. My life belongs to the people around me just as much as it does to me. It is in loving other people, belonging to them, and letting them stake a claim to me that I will find Jesus, and that is really what I want in life. Underneath all the longing for change and adventure is a deep desire to see him made real in my life. I suppose that if he wants to do that here instead of somewhere else, the only thing to do is trust that he knows best.