An empty room. A beautifully empty room, yet an empty room. I want to piece together a sentence describing my love for empty rooms but I can’t because I love rooms full of people. It’s a give and take. Some days it works well, like today. I am in a quiet house and beginning to unpack the suitcase of feelings I have been sitting on struggling to fully zip for the past three months. I hate unpacking but I also hate digging through a suitcase trying to find what I need and then realizing that nothing in the suitcase is of any use anymore. It’s a give and take. There are days that I hate empty rooms and quiet houses and all I want is to hear voices laughing and yelling over each other in heated game nights. There are days when I so desperately need someone to shove me off of my suitcase, rip open the zipper, and start asking me why I thought I needed to pack this stuff in the first place. It’s a give and take. Tonight I will give and take and see where in the world we end up because the suitcase is full and the mess won’t be pretty.
I think I like to display my room as full most of the time. I’d rather show the fun and business much rather than the quiet and emptiness. I don’t exactly know why, because both are important and real and true. But maybe it’s the important and real and true things that we hide. Maybe these highlight reels of our lives over social media or even in daily conversation are disguising the things that thread us all together. We can’t all connect on the levels of owning the same things, enjoying the same spaces, or even understanding why others aren’t what we are. What we can connect on is brokenness, longing, sufferings, frustrations, waiting, enduring, persevering, hoping, trusting, loving, and living. That isn’t the easy but that is the important and real and true. Jesus calls for much more of us than to just sit together, laugh together, or find similarities.
All the believers were together and had everything in common. Acts 2:44
He calls us to more because as a body of believers we already have everything in common. If I have dedicated my life to Him ask Him to be my everything and you do the same, then we have the same everything. In our relationships with each other we have to go deeper because the depths of our souls are all in alignment. We all desire the same thing at the end of the day: love. Our souls, whether we want them to or not, desire the love that only the Savior can bring. So why do we try to pretend that we have everything together when we know that we are all in the same boat?
Today, I struggle with contentment in my present circumstances, my purpose, confidence in myself both inwardly and outwardly, and just continually wanting an answer to all of my “why” questions.
I feel as if I’m sitting in an empty room that I am all too familiar with knowing this is where I am supposed to be yet my friends are spread throughout the world experiencing something new and exciting. So I just go along with this and try to make the most out of it but at the end of the day I’m still in an empty room. It’s not a bad thing though; there is much to be learned and to be heard in the silence. There is rest and equipping that happens in the stillness. There is the realization of our own depravity to be seen. The fullness of Christ that allows us to be content but man, I still struggle with full contentment.
I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. Philippians 4:11-12
I am striving for more of this right now. I want to be fully content with no worry of tomorrow. But that leads me to the next place: how to “not worry about tomorrow” yet prepare myself to do His good works when I have no idea where I need to be headed. I so badly want to have an answer when people ask me what I want to do when I graduate. I’m a junior for crying out loud. I have felt a pull toward working with Young Life but have felt a lot of fuzziness of what that may look like. As I type this I can’t even pour out the next two sentences I have typed and deleted 12 times because it comes down to the truth that I need to chase Jesus in the place my feet are laid right now knowing that He will guide them to the left or right if need be. Frick. Sometimes I would rather sulk in confusion and push off the passion than run after something I don’t know the outcome to yet. Selfishness at its finest. Welp there goes a stack of crap from my suitcase. Off to the dry cleaners to look deeper into that in a bit.
This morning I woke up to see that my 20 year old face resembled much of a 13 year old’s. Zits and pimples and scars and bags. One of those days that I send snapchats of walls and random objects rather than my face. I slapped on a baseball cap and sunglasses and hoped that I could fly under the radar. I am also coming down with some kind of sinus infection, which is such a sweet thing to receive on 100 degree days full of trying to remain patient, joyful and loving towards children that I’m strapping into harnesses. Being on the ropes crew is my absolute favorite job at any camp because you get to encourage people that are in the midst of a model of spiritual warfare- trusting that their rope is going to guard them and keep them safe even when the gravity of the world is against them like our need to trust God to guard us and shelter us from the sin and destruction of the world that burdens us each day. But hot dang, strapping people into harnesses and helmets and repeating the same rules over six times a day knowing that the majority of them were probably picking their nose and thinking about pizza can get exhausting. To sum that up, today was one where confidence and energy were at an all time low but I had to continually remind myself of who He tells me I am and that the joy of the Lord is my strength and the only way I could make it through the hardest days or the easiest is through His joy that comes when all odds are against it.
Why, why, why, why, why. I’m going to make this one short, quick and to the point. Because He said so. Why? That’s for Him to know and us to find out. When? When He wants us to. Why? He knows what’s best for us. dangit.
Welp, it’s 8:36 PM and I have yet to eat dinner and I need to see if this acne cream is actually doing anything. Thank you for helping me unpack. I hope it encourages you to do the same. He wants to see the messy. And when we share the messy others find comfort and show Him their messy, too.