(now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

When I asked God to show me signs, I had no expectation of that actually happening. Out of desperation (and utter impatience) one day I said, “God, please, just show me some signs!” What I was really doing was shamelessly telling God that I just couldn’t believe that He was the reason behind the sudden changes. It had to be more; bad luck, an old friend’s carelessness, circumstance… or so I thought. Bold move on my part to ask God to elaborate, to prove to me the way he was paving for me was actually His doing– without thinking about it, I was actually asking the God of the Universe to prove it to me.  But

God met me; He showed me my silly signs. And in the end,  that which gives me peace is not the proof, ironically, but that my Jesus would go through such great lengths to so tangibly reveal his love for me.

“As long as we are trying to run away from our loneliness we are constantly looking for distractions with the inexhaustible need to be entertained and kept busy. We become the passive victims of a world asking for our idolizing attention. We become dependent on the shifting chain of events leading us into quick changes of mood, capricious behavior and, at times, revengeful violence. Then our life becomes a spastic and often destructive sequence of actions and reactions pulling us away from our inner selves.”       Henri Nouwen

 i love this quote because it speaks directly to my greatest barrier in my walk with the Lord… it explains how frazzled I get sometimes, it explains how sometimes I just get turned around.  

about a month ago, I was talking to a dear friend about listening to God; mostly I was complaining about how hard it is. First you have to get things quiet enough to hear Him, then you have to rule out all the other competing voices: yourself, the devil (who, ironically, sounds a lot like God sometimes), other people… then once you’ve done that (if you haven’t given up by now) you have to interpret and accept what He spoke to you. <– this is my defualt mode for understanding/listening to God. But the deeper I grow in my walk, the more I am realizing how dysfunctional my default system of communication with God actually is. Having told this to my friend, it is what she said to me that brought some hope to the situation. She said, “Jen, above all, the Lord just wants to heal you. He wants to lay you on His operating table and do the necessary work.” It is her simple insight that has dramatically changed the way I approach the Lord for direction. Instead of going to him for the answer; the next step, the next plan, the next move, I go to Him to be healed, being out-of-control enough to be satisfied with healing and not omens. Funny to think that I am going to need to be healed for the rest of my life, daily, yearly, without a doubt… but the Lord’s operating table, unlike others, is a place of unexpected excitement and peace.

sixth grade is crazy. The kids are bouncing off the walls. Some of the girls are bigger than me, some still look like it could be their first year of school.

They know they haven’t figured things out yet, but they’re ok with that. Most sixth graders like life how it is; today, right now, next period, at lunch, after school; presently, predictably. Sure they complain about their invisability around adults and dream of being older, but the magic ages of freedom, 18 & 21, are too far away to have any real impact. In sixth grade, real life is too far away to be anxious about; adulthood is only a dream, that is why it is just as likely to want to be a pediatrcian as it is to want to be a barista. That’s because in sixth grade; the barriers aren’t in place yet.

Typing away at an unfamiliar desk while the class noisily works on their group literature projects, I think about the potential of each small body in this room. They are so green, old enough to think critically, yet the pallet of their life experience is still fresh. I realize that barriers are things we create. We decide for ourselves if 6 years of college is “just too much,” we decide what to learn and how to learn it. The rise and fall of success that marks each one of our lives is in reach, and always has been.

Hang around a sixth grader, you’ll see it.