With so many new things happening in my life right now, it is difficult to blog. Not because I don't have time, but because there are so many "blogable" topics that it is hard for me to sit down and focus on just one.
All of the new things have kept me very busy, so when I something profound hits me, it comes unexpectedly and intensely. That is true of this post as well.
It is hard to be out of college. It is hard to have my life look so different. This is not because I am unhappy, on the contrary, I'm experiencing deep conviction that this is what God wants for my life right now, though I see it as a temporary "now". This is a time of transition. I mistakenly believed that the time of transition began in the weeks leading up to graduation and would end when I started teaching. False. So when will it end? When I finally buy a new car? Probably not. When I've been teaching for a couple months and have settled into a routine? Probably not. No, I'm coming to realize that this transition is likely much bigger than those things. It is likely to continue for some time.
As I have moved back home and started working, my closest friends have also moved to new things and started new jobs (or grad school). I have felt very alone. I'm longing for deep friendship. I'm longing for a person in whom I can invest time, energy, emotion, and prayer. I'm looking for someone with whom I can experience deep friendship. It is a blessing to have someone who can follow all your stories, challenge all your shortcomings, and know that they can make you laugh. That is a blessing that I had in great abundance in College. It is a blessing I want desperately again.
This is the perfect time to talk about relying heavily on God, learning to trust and love Him in a way that results in my clear understanding that I need only Him.
The timing is perfect, but the discussion is not going to happen. Not now. Now there is something that seems to be a bit more pressing. We were created for communion with God through persons. We were created to love God in the people around us. To be a reflection of the relationships that is God, the Trinity.
God calls us to respond to this reality in different ways. The priest encounters the communitive nature of God in the people to whom he ministers. The religious sister or monk encounters that community in the other members of the Order. The husband and wife encounter it in each other and in their children.
The question for me, who believes I am called to the married life, is: how am I to encounter that community now? What does God want for that part of me that was created for community?
Yesterday, I read an old post Elizabeth had linked. In it, she described the many different phases in her life during which she made a familiar drive to a certain College Campus. Reading it, I was struck be the beauty of the movement of time, the grace which sprinkled every new phase with God. I found myself running, literally out of my seat, looking for some place where I could catch my breath. I needed a place where I could pause and breathe in God's will for my life. What I could read in her descriptions was the many different ways she was able to encounter God.
It leaves me wondering what this time of longing for personal communion, for an encounter with God in a new person, this time of gasping, literally -not for air, but for my breath, for my life, for God - will one day look like.
Where is this time of transition taking me?
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