There's this thing called "Life"

Hey.
So, there's this thing called "Life".
It's been happening lately.


It seems like it recently, anyways.  I've tried to find a better way to put it, but that's the best that I can do.  Life is happening right now.
I know, I know, it's happening all the time, it's been happening since the day I was born, etc etc etc.  I get that.  But there's something about this whole Ireland experience that has thrown all of that into a little bit of a different perspective.  I'll see if I can explain...

On Sunday, Josipa (my German roommate) and I went for a long walk down at the beach.  And I do mean a long walk- we went down to the sand dunes and back, which all together is about 10km.  For the first half hour, we just began to talk about all this exchange experience is bringing to light for us personally.  In a lot of ways, we had the same feelings about it.  It's hard to describe to people who haven't done it themselves, but it's something like a sense of accomplishment and achievement, and a wonderful and weird new independence, and it's extremely gratifying to be able to look back and say "Hey, look what I did.... and look what I could do now."  My host family kept telling me the first several days that once I did this exchange, I could go and do anything.  I didn't quite get what they were saying until these last couple of weeks.  Similarly, people kept telling me as I was preparing to leave that this was an incrediblty brave thing to do, and my reaction was kind of just laughing it off, and wondering why I didn't feel very brave about it at all.
But like I said, looking back now, I can see what they mean.  I don't mean to "toot my own horn" or anything here, but this was a very brave thing to do.  I had only flown twice before, and never on my own.  But on the 28th of August, I boarded a plane to Chicago and then to Dublin all by myself.  I set off to spend five months with people I had never met before, ever.  I stepped out like I never really have ever before in my life.  I look back and I can see all the ways that I have grown already in just two months, as a person and in Christ.  And I am proud of that.
Do I sound like I'm bragging?  I'm really not trying to.  There's nothing wrong with being proud of myself, is there?  Because I am.  But that's not all I'm trying to say here.

Imagine deciding that you want to go to another country, not for a vacation, not for a mission trip, not as a tourist in any sense of the term, but to live there.  You might think, "Oh, yay, fun!  All these cool stories and experiences and pictures I'll get to have and tell everyone about when I get back! This is going to be great!"  But here's the catch: life goes on back home, too.  Yes, you will have amazing stories to tell, and you will meet insane people, and you will go to a completely new town and come away feeling like it's just as much your own as Charlotte, North Carolina is.  But life back home won't go on a standstill while you're away.
You might be thinking, "Well, of course it won't.  Things don't happen that way.  Who is this crazy kid, thinking that she will leave and therefore life will stop?" Don't get me wrong, I didn't really believe that America would be like the town in that episode of Arthur where everyone and everything was literally frozen in action until someone found the "key to the city".  But I guess in the back of my head, it didn't really click until now that things really will be very different when I go back.  Five months will have passed.  My friends and family will have changed.  Relationships and parties and projects and tragedies will have happened in their lives that I will not have been a part of.  And as a person who has this weird fear of missing out on things, that is both a bit scary and a bit sad to me... That is, until I remember that the change isn't only one-sided.  That's the difference in perspective that I've beentrying to get at through this whole post.

There's an entry in my prayer journal about how I think this whole Ireland thing was meant to make me grow up.  But rereading that now a few weeks later, I think it was more about just making me grow in general.  About this time last year, God put a pull on my heart to come here like He never had before.  I didn't understand why at the time, just that it was something I needed to respond to.  Now I can see that the Lord was calling me away for a very specific purpose: to get me to let go.
You know how the only way to teach some people to swim is to throw them in a pool?  They're too scared to get in themselves, or too scared to be in the water without an instructor to hold them up and a flotation device securely under their arm.
Well, continuing with the analogy (which I know isn't exactly perfect for what I'm trying to say, but work with it), imagine that the scared young swimmer is me, and the pool- or perhaps more appropriately, the ocean- is God's vast self.  All my life, being blessed enough to grow up in a Christian home, I have had these "swimming lessons" with various instructors, some family members, some sunday school teachers, some youth leaders and pastors, all of whom were excellent.  They taught me what God could look like, and they gently (though sometimes also forcefully) drew me into what a life with our Lord could be.  I learned all the basics, from how to doggie-paddle to how to float on my back when I'm too tired.  Devotionals and sunday school classes, youth group and worship services, mission trips and weekend retreats- these were my "floaties", if you will.  The church that I grew up in, as messy and frustrating as it is sometimes, is in a huge part responsible for helping me to where I am now.  Those people and experiences gave me a kind of vision of what swimming could look like.  I might have had a dream to swim across a bay or maybe the Channel, even if that seemed a very distant reality.
However, there was a problem.  As helpful and wonderful as those instructors and floats were, I got used to having them in the water with me.  Even while my one arm was splashing in delight and my legs were going a mile a minute, I had become too accustomed to having my other hand firmly holding onto something or someone else that I knew and that felt safe.  I couldn't let go.  I couldn't jump in for myself.  And it wasn't like that was hugely crippling- believe me, God is much bigger than my own faults, and He did work around that and teach me things despite it- but it was there, and it was problematic enough that it occasionally held me back.
So then I came here, to this awesome place.  (And when you consider all I just confessed about holding on, that's a testament in itself.)  I had to let go of a hell of a lot- my home, half my senior year, my friends, my family, my culture. The first couple of days were some of the scariest of my life, but as typically happens in situations like this, they were also some of the most rewarding.  As I've said already in some of my other posts, my time here has been filled with experiences that have completely blown my mind; and as I've said earlier in this post, I've become much more independent and confident and proud of what I have achieved.  But there's a converse to all of that, and this side of things needs to be recognized much more than learning to surf or how to count to ten in Irish or budgeting my life so that I'll have enough money for shampoo, because it's the only side of things that matters.  And that converse side is about all the ways God has been meeting me.  You see, as I've become more independent, I've become more dependent on the Lord's presence and will than ever before.  As my confidence has grown, my hunger for Him has grown even more exponentially.  As I have done things to be proud of, I'm also being humbled daily with the knowledge that I am nothing without God's grace and mercy.  For all the one-of-a-kind experiences I've had, my day is not complete until I can just experience the peace and joy of being with our Saviour.  I could go on and on about so much more with this, but you probably get the picture.

So to finish my analogy (and this ridiculously long post), it got to the point in my life where swim intructors and inflatables could only take me so far.  Honestly, I think God might have been getting a bit fed up with it all, and so He just threw me right into the middle of the ocean.  And praise be to Him, I've not only remembered how to doggie-paddle and float on my back, but He's teaching me all the strokes.  He's teaching me how to sprint, how to pace myself, how to dive deeper, and how to come up for air and rest.  Who knows what's coming after the next wave- but I know that whatever it is, it will be a life completelty immersed in Him, and that makes all the difference. 

So bring it on.  Forget the Channel, I feel like swimming the Pacific.