I have this habit of getting settled into life. I always find myself getting used to the way things currently are, as if they will never change. I forget that life is a crazy journey that never stops moving, taking me to a new place every time I look up from my feet. I think about the way my life looks now in comparison to the way it looked last semester and find myself wondering why it had to get so confusing and complex. Last year was easy and lighthearted; I made some amazing friends and had a lot of really good times with them. This year everything is different; most of my relationships are either changing or they are gone and I'm often making big decisions, rather than memories. Last year I was confident in the way I was headed, knowing mostly what to expect and who I was going to be around. This year I've no idea where I'll be, what I'll be doing, or who I'll be with in two months. What's worse than that is that I have no idea where I want to be, what I want to be doing, or who I want to be with in two months. I change my mind daily and then get so frustrated with my own fickleness that I grow numb to the situation entirely, floating through my daily activities, thinking about irrelevant things or not thinking at all. There are times when I feel as if I'm in this dark place and all I can see are the forms of things around me; all I'm doing is stumbling around, but I have no idea where I'm going, I'm just moving to move.
And then I am reminded that God is here as well. He does not dwell only in the happy and light moments. He is not found only when all is good and easy. He is very much present in this dark place, making me more aware of His light daily. I may not know where I am going, but He does, and that's all that matters. It isn't my life anyway. These are the times in which true Joy grows. Not that easy, surface joy (although that has a place too), but the deep kind of Joy that knows no circumstance. It is not grounded in my emotions, but rather in the knowledge that I am loved by the Creator of the universe and that He is making me into something beautiful. The transformation can be painful at times, but it is worth every second of the waiting, every second of the confusion.
This is the prismatic life. There are happy, light colors, and there are dark, rich colors merited only by patience and placing trust in Christ while I wait out the storm.
"God is waiting to be found everywhere, in the darkest corners of our lives, the dead ends and bad neighborhoods we wake up in, and the simplest, lightest, most singular and luminous moments. He's hiding, like a child, in quite obvious and visible places, because He wants to be found. The miracle is that He dwells in both. I knew He dwelt in the latter, the bright and beautiful, because I had been finding Him there for years, in the small moments of beauty and hope that poke through the darkness of our days. But lately I have been finding Him not just under the darkness, but in it... I have found a strange beauty in the darkness, one I've never seen, a slower, subtler beauty..." -Shauna Niequist, Cold Tangerines
