As a caffeine-automated, undeclared college student, I often feel completely in over my head. I don’t have my future figured out. I miss a little too much chapel. I haven’t met “the one.” I question my faith. I’m scared I’ll end up like my parents. I probably cry a little too much. I miss home. In no regard do I have my life together.
If you’re like me, I apologize for this chaos. But life isn’t color-coordinated schedules from birth to death, and life isn’t static. Life changes rapidly like the needle of a seismograph, dipping low to the depths of the earth and then reaching high to grasp at the sunbeams, morphing endlessly and cosmically to the rhythm of the spirit. Our comprehension of whether or not we’re on track can evolve by the second; we are content with our pace at one moment and overcome with stress the next.
It’s interesting to hear people talk about how life will be better after college, after they get a job, after they’re married or after this one tough class, as if life will suddenly become brilliantly simple after they delve further in debt from a honeymoon or graduate school. Not that those goals aren’t great to have, but chaos always arrives like an unwelcome guest. As our world is a cracked reflection of God’s future plans for us, the hum of the earth is slightly out of tune.
Disappointment, tragedy, stress, pressure, discrimination, worry, fear and the like will always linger in the dark corners of our lives. Rather than seeing these as symbols of a failure to keep our lives intact, see these as the deeper hues on the spectrum of living. They color in the phases of life with tragic beauty, patience, understanding and wisdom, and by contrast make the golden and rose-tinted moments shine much more radiantly. Life is to be lived in each shade of the kaleidoscope of emotions, not without a grateful heart. Enjoy the good, learn from the bad and appreciate the ugly. No one is okay all the time. Stress is normal. It will pass.
May the God of all peace, comfort, and confidence nurture and soothe your soul through this season, for he did not come to help us achieve something, but to love.
