of dreams and the future

This was first penned to a dear friend whose blog you should definitely check out. It was as much for her and I as it is for you--I had it in the back of my mind that it might make its way here. After a refreshing weekend on one of my favorite humble plots of land (Camp Union) I am home and seeing with new eyes, learning that "the secret to joy is to keep seeking God where we doubt He is." (Ann Voskamp)

I walk on remembering that you know this place. I trudge through the uncertainty, the flailing arms and flinging questions that sit on my shoulders and whisper to my mind: Why does it seem that no one wants to hire me? Why does it feel as though all the work, the care, the dedication, the love of it cannot be translated through the iceberg with writing we call a resume, hardly anything worth resuming. What part of my flat, paper self  falls thin to the other papers that are not even papers but electronic files, just lines and lines of code—and who can find soul in words that cannot be poems?

But you know this place, this path of that dreaded word that smacks us in the line of the grocery store when we cannot bear to think the person in front of us might dig another coupon out of her carpet bag with the bird-handled umbrella sticking out of it. That p-word that demands of us what we are too angry, too hurt, too scared to give because we wonder if calm means we don’t care? Patience. There, I said it. You’ve known the path that requires that precious commodity found only in choice.

You’ve had to wait.

And in my fluttering honesty, you had to wait longer. I think you still are. For those dreams, and I have waited, what, two months? And already I’m fidgeting because impatience is an uncomfortable position in a hard chair that aches your bones and cricks your neck.

I remember trying to find the words to say trying to grasp the difficulty of walking without certainty. Of being encouraged by your certainty in the one thing we both know is a firm place to found a life.

Him.

I remember them because you said them, and I echoed them back to help you remember them, these electrifying promises.  For our good. Friend, for our good. That is what He said, and we both know our good is not the smooth slope, because smooth seas and skilled sailors and all that stuff they say. It is the narrow valleys, steep cliffs and tear-stained nights that do the difficult, sometimes painful work of making us whole.

That tearing off of darkness to make way, make room for dawn.