Tuesday, June 1, 2010

I love this world: I live in the southeast, and right now, early summer, is one of the most beautiful times of year. Spring is also beautiful, with all the green bursting forth seemingly overnight, and fall's colors are as captivating as a Matisse painting. I love being alive, which is something of a change from past attitudes of apathy, and I look forward to my future: continuing my education, reading new books, meeting new people, having new ideas, seeing new things and new places. Getting married. Having children. RAISING those children. Doing something meaningful with my life, whatever that may be.

Life is wonderful and I can't wait to experience all of it.

But at the same time, as I get older, I'm introduced to the duality of nature. The world is beautiful and exciting and wonderful, but at the same time, it's scary, dangerous, and not at all something to be prolonged. This is seen in the deaths of people I love and want with me. In the changing of summer's green to fall's orange to winter's cold gray. In friends moving away, of my moving further away emotionally from people I used to love. In uncertainty for my future, and in not knowing what I will do or whether my life truly does have meaning.

C.S Lewis would say this is God reminding us that we don't belong here, in the most pivotal sense of the phrase. We're not meant to be comfortable in this world, because comfort leads to complacency and a desire to keep the dream rather than to move forward to the reality.

Discomfort on earth is good for us. It keeps us from becoming too attached to "the things of earth" and constantly pushes us forward to something "more." Only one of the reasons I try to accept my discomfort and unhappiness along with my joy.

It reminds me of a Rich Mullins song:

Nobody tells you when you get born here
How much you'll come to love it and how you'll never belong here
So I'll call you my country, but I'm lonely for my home.
I wish that I could take you there with me.
I'll sing His song in the land of my sojourn.

I'll choose to keep singing.

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