Another Shift

Lots of processing lately. Processing the past....how it's not the present anymore. Shuffling through and beginning to sort things into the "mostly done" pile and the "still very relevant" pile. Processing the present and how it's so different from the past and what I have experienced and yet how it's still clinging to childhood. Due to my quite introverted self, these are the things that often fill my head.

However, most recently, I have begun to process what is coming. The last time I thought about it this much it all centered around leaving for college. Here I am. An independent (yet not really at all) young woman three thousand miles from home and earning my education one paper and relationship at a time. But here, like some crazy hurricane, comes "moving in."

And not the kind of moving in that denotes moving out first...but the kind of moving in where I'm already out of my childhood home, and I've been out a while, but now I"m entering into a place that will become my home...a separate entity from my family according to the government  And yes, I don't hold that much stock in how they define what I am, but it's the only way I've been able to pin this "moving in" down in any sort of way. It likes to wriggle around...like the bugs captured, pinned, labeled, and lining the walls of my seventh grade science class.

I'll say "independent young woman" and actually mean it.

I can say it's like a hurricane, but a hurricane is too familiar. I could say tsunami, but it comes too suddenly. Everyone has seen this coming since my birth. I suppose it's just a leap...yet not off a cliff, because I'm to move forward, yet not on a sidewalk where I can count the squares zipping by underneath me. I can't leap this far forward on my own.

The thing that strikes me most however - this mystery beyond all of the unfamiliarity - is how calm I am. I don't  know where I'm to live, I can't be certain of who I will live with, or how I will find a vehicle, or how I will cope with the drastic changes. In the past, even little discrepancies such as where I sit in class, or strange formatting for a paper has thrown me spinning into anxiety. I almost wish I could say that I'm leaning on Matthew 6:34 which tells us to "...not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble." BUT! Something even more comforting is filling me...the peace of the LORD. I am not striving to comfort myself or frantically setting up walls or structures to make sure life is channeled where I want it...I'm simply waiting.

Now and again I stop and think "why am I not anxious?" and I don't have an answer beyond the LORD's kindness to me. How great is the LORD. He's given me peace I do not even have the wisdom to ask for.