"it's like you've just fallen into God's grace"

It's wonderfully crazy to me how true the title of this post is at this very moment.  My best friend wrote this to me in a message: "I'm so jealous of you. It's like you've just fallen into God's grace, and even though technically, your life is kinda crazy at the moment, it just feels still."  She's right.  And it's so ironic because I spent a year and a half in the exact same place: living at the same house, going to the same school, knowing the same people, doing the same crazy things, and it never felt still.  Every second of every day, my life was rushing past me and the world was swirling around me; I couldn't keep up.   The closest I got to stillness was the time I spent writing and painting and listening to music and thinking at ungodly hours of the morning, the only soul awake in a house full of women.  And now here I am: I've just moved 660 miles away from the city I grew up in to a place I love, with no plans, no friends (close in proximity, that is), and no idea what to expect.  And it's delicious.  Gilda Radner writes, "Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.  Delicious ambiguity..." 

I think I spend most of my life planning it.  [That is the biggest understatement I've ever written in my life.]  I sit in my room and think about what I want to do and try to picture myself doing different things, just to see if I can, and I make lists and lists - bucket lists, pro/con lists, to do lists.  And I've been convinced by society that this is normal, expected, even.  That I have to have a plan.  That that's what God wants.  But really I think God wants me in the exact position I'm in right now all the time.  I have no idea what is going to happen this semester.  I don't even know how to go about planning it because there are so many unknown and unfathomable factors.  I already tried once to plan it out.  My brain started hurting.

And I had a revelation.  I could plan out the rest of this month, this semester, this year, even my life and none of it may ever come to fruition.  No matter how much planning I do, if it's not God's will, it's not happening.  And what's funny is that I sit here and make all these plans that sound pretty badass in my head - all the cool things I'll do, the cool people I'll know, how cool I'll be in the future after I grow out of being lame - and they're actually pretty puny compared to the awesome plans God's already made.  Let's break this down: if I, Sarah, this crazy, irresponsible, lame girl can come up with plans that sound really cool and exciting, how much more awesome can the plans of the most creative, most imaginative, most beautiful Being be?  I mean, it just sounds like He can do a better job than me.  Plus, on top of all that, I don't even have to do a thing to plan it all out.  All of this thinking and planning and working-things-out is futile.  God doesn't ask us to sit in our rooms and write about the things we want to do and make lists and plan out the next year.  He commands us to follow Christ and to do.  I can't glorify Him and love His people by isolating myself and surrounding myself with my ideas and my calendar and my views of the world. 

So here I am, I took the biggest leap I've taken yet in my short 19 years and I'm caught right in the middle of God's grace.  I know something big is coming this semester, I can feel the winds of it, taste the sweetness of it.  It may be something big and meaningful and groundbreaking that I'll do.  Or it may just be a new way of living.  Whatever it is, my prayer is something that another friend of mine sent to me the day I moved: that I will open my heart to all the new experiences I will have.  They'll break me and remake me, inspire me and free me, foster my spirit and change the way I see things.  And every one of them will give me a little taste of God's grace.