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when I was little, I read this mystery book with a character who could take mental pictures. she would blink, like a camera shuttering, and make a little ‘click,’ and her mind perfectly saved that moment. she could go back to it anytime she wanted to and remember exactly what she was seeing. I always wanted to be able to do that, to save a moment in my mind like a photograph, and I tried. most of the time, it didn’t work. I’d try super hard to remember but the picture would just fade away. I’d remember I’d taken a picture but couldn’t remember what it was of, or the pictures that did stay were unimportant, not things that really mattered to me, like the pink flowers on a smooth dead tree on the drive back from the beach. those things didn’t count. they were beautiful, but not what I really wanted to remember.

but one day, we were sitting on your bed. I think it was the afternoon. just us. and you had the blanket pulled halfway up your face. you know, the peachy orange one, almost scratchy but not quite, thick and warm. all the way to your nose, like you sometimes did when we were talking. and you were looking at me. all I could really see were your eyes. the eyes that I know are brown, with a bit of gold in them when the sun hits just right. and I remember really wanting to remember that moment. I’d never met a person my heart wanted to take a picture of more badly. and I think because I was scared of losing you, I was even more desperate to capture it. to never let it go.

that picture has stuck with me ever since.

Here’s something I’m realizing about God… he rarely does what we think he’s going to do. And that’s generally because our dreams and ideas are too small for him. What he did for me in the past three days is no different.

I decided to go to Passion 2018 probably not in the same way most students did. I had written it off – too last minute, too far, too many people – until three days before the conference began. I was sitting at the kitchen counter, staring at a job application I was supposed to be filling out, and all I could think about was how dizzy I was, how my breath felt constricted. I hopped in the shower just to feel the water on my skin, just to get outside myself a bit. I was thinking about how my plans didn’t work out, how I’m still still stuck in the same city with my same self with my same circumstances for the foreseeable future. I was thinking about how I wanted to rest in God but just didn’t know how, my head knowing all the answers but my heart just couldn’t feel anything anymore, nothing but dark and sad and scared. He felt so far away, almost like he didn’t exist. I knew he did. I had felt his presence, his spirit, in a powerful and undeniable way in a church on my knees in 2013, and hundreds of smaller moments before and since. But now, I felt completely alone. I couldn’t reach him. And I needed him now more than ever.

I decided to go to Passion because I needed a way out. I told myself it was practical, a vehicle for physically leaving my world behind for a while, but I also desperately wanted God to do something. Anything. Anything other than the way I felt right now.

Honestly, I felt a little insane as I packed my bag, prepping to sit in a van for hours with over twenty college kids I didn’t know to join a conference of thousands of more people I didn’t know to talk and sing and think about Jesus nonstop for the next three days. I was the girl who isolates herself because she doesn’t know how to be around people and carry her pain. I was the girl who almost never made it all the way through a church service because the emotions and the truth clash and it’s just all too much to surrender. I was the girl who hides in the familiar and the small and the comfort of a quiet bedroom and fictional adventures. Not the girl who decides on a whim to jump in the car with strangers, basically attend church 24/7, and constantly be around thousands of people I didn’t know. I really did feel crazy. And I completely lost it as I left my house in the morning, the thoughts in my head spooling out and circling me, you don’t belong there you don’t belong with these people you can’t handle this you should just stay home stay put and just get over yourself. But my need to get out was bigger than my need to hide. And God used that to get me where I needed to be for him to blow my mind.

As my group walks into the arena, I immediately feel surrounded by possibility. The speakers are pumping. Purple lights illuminate the mist, making the air seem to glow. Cellphone lights bob from the far reaches of the accumulating crowd, like stars or white fireflies. The atmosphere feels as if it is humming with life. I look out on it all, the stage, the full seats, the blasting music, and am aware that I am still me. I am still the girl who hides, who struggles, who loves in an empty room, who feels trapped by everything that she is and isn’t, who cannot seem to pierce her own isolation and dark, who can’t seem to reach her God. But I also felt promise. Promise that if I come, if anyone comes, we will not be turned away.

And so here comes the part where even as I ask God to something, I already have a presupposed idea of what it’s going to look like. I ask him to remove my depression and anxiety. I ask him to either completely take away the desire that has caused so much hurt in my heart or give me peace and confidence that he’s going to fulfill that desire. I say, do this or this. Hit me with a metaphorical lightning bolt, one that changes everything. But I also say, whatever you want to do, don’t leave me where I am, because I can’t stay here anymore. I can’t change myself. You can. And that’s all he was waiting to hear.

The music starts, and something incredible begins. When I decided not to run, to let him in, God filled every second of that time. The next few hours blur into days, moments all strung together by his mighty hand. I came as nothing, a shell waiting to be filled, a person begging to be rescued. And he did, and totally blew my expectations of what that was going to look like out of the water. I am still processing all that happened in my heart and in that arena and probably will continue to process these things for a long time.

In the end, God didn’t do what I asked. And yet he did. He did both things, and neither. Often this is the way God works, in seeming contradictions and impossibilities, that only make sense once we experience them, are willing to be open to them. He lifted off of me the burden of depression and anxiety that I have been feeling. I was in a pit where I couldn’t see and I couldn’t breathe and he pulled me out of it. But I also know I will still struggle with sadness and fear. We cannot escape these things in this life, on this earth. Sin and heartbreak go hand in hand. We have the promise of wholeness but the world is still broken. Even as God brought his peace and strength and light to my heart, I still intimately knew the fracture lines in my heart. They are as familiar to me as the sun and the night, I can trace them with a fingertip with my eyes closed. While I am here, they will always be part of me. Where love is great, pain is great. This is a part of life. But at the same time, I felt God breaking me free from the depth which I had been at. He says, you will feel pain and fear and confusion and achings, but you will not drown in them. Not while I am here.

And then, he did something strange with my desires, my longings. I expected him to take them away or tell me he will fulfill them. But he did neither. He filled me up with who he is. The songs and the messages reminded me of who God is in a new way, and as I surrendered everything I was to those truths, my heart started to wake up. I told God, I just want you, everything that you are, all of you, just fill me up with yourself, and he said yes. always. Here’s the thing about being a Christian – you don’t have to feel God to believe in him. Just like you don’t need to visit India to know it exists, or see the sun in the nighttime to believe that it’s there. Believing is not about feeling or seeing. It is about knowing. About truth. About the facts lining up. And they do, and that should be enough. But it is human to want to feel. I have been blessed to have powerfully felt the presence of God a few times in my life. And in that arena, with 10,000 people all praising God together, technologically connected with over 30,000 more, I felt him there again. It’s not something that’s easy to explain. I don’t know if it’s something that people can explain, because the words just aren’t there. But we know it when we feel it, and it’s not something deniable.

Over and over again, God showed me this: He is the lightning bolt. No change in my circumstances or my desires can make as big and true an impact as his presence in my life and the condition of my relationship with him. When I let him fill my focus and my heart, everything changed. My desires did not change, but when I desired him above all else, I didn’t feel them as sharply. They felt smaller. Not because they were any smaller, but because next to God, they couldn’t compare. He eclipsed me. God is worth infinitely more than anything else we could ever want. And in the end, everything good we desire is a reflection of who he is – that’s why we want it in the first place, because it is good. But ultimately, our biggest desire and need is him, and nothing else can fully satisfy us. It’s one thing to know that, and quite another to feel it. My desire is still there. My love is still the same. My memories intact. What was true before is still true now. But with God, it doesn’t have to overwhelm me. All is not lost if my desire isn’t fulfilled here. God will be enough for me. And in the end, in the perfect world that is to come, every desire will be fulfilled, in ways more perfect than we can imagine.

And yes, God did give me peace. He did give me hope. But he gave them to me through my being willing for him to do whatever he wants in my life. Through knowing that he cares about my loves and my desires. Through believing in his fierce, unstoppable love for me and for the people I love. I don’t know what’s going to happen. No one can ever know. But with God, I have hope for good things, even if the good things he has for me aren’t the ones that I would have picked. His plans are better than anything I could choose. Bigger. But he also hears me when I pray. He feels my heart when I love. And with him, anything is possible. And it. will. be. good.

I am aware that the experience I had at Passion definitely qualifies as a “mountaintop” experience. It was full of revelation followed by revelation, one after the other even when I thought there couldn’t possibly be any more. It transcended most of the experiences I have ever had. It was full of feeling and seeing and not just believing and knowing. Whenever you climb a mountain, you have to come back down. You can’t stay up there forever. It doesn’t mean you leave behind what you have learned and who you have become, but you do have to come down to the life you normally walk, full of plains and hills and even valleys, but rarely mountains. I am aware that I probably will not feel this peaceful, this grounded, this full, this satisfied, this courageous, this lit up, in few days. Right now it feels like there’s this direct line between me and God, a 24/7 connection. I know that most of the time it doesn’t feel like that, even though nothing has changed, even though his spirit is still present and living in me. I am aware that as I come down off this “high,” sadness will trickle back into me again. Fear will attack me. Those fracture lines are going to hurt like nobody’s business. But I’m going to fight back. I know who I am. I am a daughter of the King. I am never alone. And he’s already won every battle that I have to fight.

During the last session of the conference, someone said, “Be in the dark who you are in the light.” I like that. It feels like the truest statement for me. It doesn’t deny that there is going to be dark, that I will have to live through darkness. But it also confirms that there is light. That who I am in the light is the person I was always meant to be, the person I truly am. The person God has made me to be, who he will help me continue to be, get better at being. Right now, after these few days, I feel like I am living in the light, despite the darkness of unmet desires and love that keeps on going without answer. I am infinitely grateful for that. I am not the same person that left for Passion. But I also know that the farther away from this mountain I get, the more the dark will undoubtedly return. But that doesn’t mean that who I truly am is different. That doesn’t mean that God is different. And that’s what I want – no matter what happens, I want to live in the dark as the person I am in the light. And with God in me and around me and by my side, I will.

dreamcatchers hanging on my doors

I wonder why you don’t work anymore

my sleeps are haunted by dreams

your feathers and tethered string don’t catch

yet perhaps your wooden frames

are not dissimilar to God –

I only see the brokenness let through

not the undoubtedly greater darkness

you never allow to reach me

alone rather than together

surrender rather than struggle

radio silence rather than contact

a decision that perhaps holds up

when I view it from afar

but when I take it into my hands

it falls apart

maybe because it isn’t mine.

but still there is nothing I can do

because it was always yours

to reverse.

yes, I built a wall

a towering structure that I hated

yet needed

but I always hoped we could one day

tear it down

and I don’t know how to stop.

wrapping presents just isn’t the same this year,

perhaps because I know what I truly want

I won’t find under the tree,

that my heart hurts because of a missing piece

no wintry magic can fill.

the greatest gift would be for you

to reach across this space and hold me,

to be honest with whatever your heart speaks,

to give me nothing less or more than truth,

because all I want is you.

my top two fears have always been this: (1) losing people. (2) being trapped.

(although drowning is also somewhere on the list, which is ridiculous and incredibly improbable but explains why water and I have never thoroughly gotten along. oh, and cave crickets. I really hate cave crickets. I mean, an insect that looks like a spider but jumps and has no sense of direction? um, no thank you.)

I think this is why most of this year has sucked so much. because both of those things happened, although perhaps not in the way I originally feared them to. and realizing that losing you is connected to my two biggest fears has helped me explain why I feel so darn scared sometimes. I never could figure it out. it started last semester, as I tried to figure out what the heck was going on with me. as I thought about losing you, something would start to happen. it was a feeling that started in my heart and then made its way to spiraling thoughts in my head and then crept into the body. and then, later, it would just boom, be there, out of control breathing and wanting to press myself into corners, and I’d wonder, what the heck is happening to me? there’s no physical danger. nothing to materially fear. so why do I feel so darn terrified? body and soul?

well, I guess it was because my number one fear was happening. and my body knew it. weirdly enough, losing someone feels a bit like drowning. and so does being trapped.

I remember a moment during my last weeks travelling in New Zealand. My friend Meg and I were kayaking in the insanely turquoise waters of Cape Rodney-Okakari Point Marine Reserve. The wind was making the water kind of choppy, but the sun was strong, and the rocks and the islands were just so sharp and colorful and present, and there were lots of people snorkeling in the water. We even saw a purple jellyfish, just float right by us. And I was in the front of the kayak and feeling the freedom of being alive and independent in this world and just being me and living outside and just engaging with life and people so fully and freely… and I voiced to Meg my fear about going home. going back to people who already had fixed perceptions of who I was. going back to a society that I didn’t feel like I belonged in. going back to rules and a known world. I was afraid I’d stop being the true me I had found on these two islands halfway around the world. I was afraid of being misunderstood and allowing that to limit me. I was afraid of being trapped, geographically and emotionally. And Meg, wonderfully wise and blunt friend that she is, said that knowing me, she couldn’t ever imagine my spirit being trapped. that I would never let that happen to me. it just isn’t who I am. and hearing that from someone gave me the courage I needed to try to believe it myself. and I went home… and I met you again. and so many other people who became so much to me. I found a space to be me. to belong. I was the least trapped I had ever felt at home.

I have realized that my fear of being trapped isn’t just a physical fear. yes, I do fear being trapped in a material space, who doesn’t? but just as real is my fear of being trapped situationally. emotionally. of being able to do nothing. of being forced into a choice I don’t want to make. of being forced into that choice by myself, by the own realities of my world. I have always been the girl that finds the people and things she’s passionate about, recognizes what she values most, and then doesn’t stop until she reaches that place. that’s a confident and powerful feeling. the feeling I was scared of losing when I came back to the States. and I didn’t lose it then. but I didn’t realize how losing people you care about, even just emotionally, makes you realize how powerless you really are. how little I actually can control. thank goodness Someone still has control. because I sure don’t.

what I never understood until now is how I can be my own worst trap. how my desires and emotions can be the prison, the straitjacket, keeping me from the emotional or physical freedom that I want. how I am my own worst enemy. I am the thing holding me back from what I can have, what I can control. yes, there are circumstances I can’t control. and to be honest, I don’t want to control them. I want you to be true to yourself, and what you feel, no matter how I’d like things to be. free will is a good thing, if a hard thing to understand. but without free will, there is no real love. God understood that when he made us. our love would not be true if he did not give us a choice. if he did not let us pick our own paths.

my fear traps me. my love traps me. my sadness traps me. my hope traps me. and yet, all these things come from me. my decisions create them. who I am creates them. I guess in reality, I’m not trapped, even when it feels like these feelings just happen to me sometimes, overtake me in their hugeness. I feel these feelings because I am me, and no one else. I can only make the decisions that are truest to who I am, and let the consequences fall where they may. and I think I am. I think I’m being as true to myself as I can be. I think doing that, and doing what is right, is all that anyone can ask of anyone else.

I often feel like my musings lead me in circles. or spirals. but at the end, writing helps me arrive at a better, or at least deeper, understanding of myself, even if it doesn’t give me answers. it helps explain myself to myself. and to whoever reads this, I hope it does the same for you.

sitting at home lends itself to introspection. however, this is something I have an abundance of. and when I wake up especially sad, I work myself deeper and deeper into it just by sitting still.

so lately, I’ll just up and decide to take a walk.

get out of my house. get out of my bed. get out of my head.

sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. but it’s never worse than doing nothing.

so today I hop in the car again and drive to the river, a place I’ve always been drawn to when my heart is hurting or frenzied. summer or winter, spring or fall, the river is… well, the river. it has a special magic to it. and so does the forest, the ivy and the trees and the woody vines. and hopefully sunshine, if I’m lucky.

it’s especially cold today. my toes are numb in my boots, hands huddled in down jacket pockets. but the more I move, the more I warm up. the river rushes by as always, blue, constant, unmovable, dynamic, beautiful. I push my headphones in, turning the shuffle on random.

music. gosh, am I thankful for music. when I listen, to almost anything, it feels like it takes over for me, for my brain, my body. it becomes my heart, the thing pumping blood and keeping me alive, and I don’t have to think so hard about existing. I can lose myself in it, or let it feel for me, breathe for me.

and it keeps my feet moving. the more I walk, the less numb I am, in all ways. I wish I could just walk forever. I need this constant, purposeless motion, movement for the sake of movement. I’ve wanted to achieve this through climbing, pulling off lap after lap… but you can only live on an autobelay for so long before your will to keep going just gives up and quits, along with your skin and your wild heartbeat and your limbs. there’s a limit, which frustrates me. I wish my body was stronger. I wish there could be this endless wall, easy and fluid, where I could just climb and climb forever. become movement. feel like I’m doing something other than walking in circles, or just wandering wherever I feel like it before turning around whenever I get tired.

but still… walking is good. running would be better, but my lungs hate me too much for that (thanks a lot, asthma. jeez.). but there is something about walking, about my legs propelling me through the world without much thought. there’s a rhythm to it, a mindlessness, but because I’m actually going somewhere, it doesn’t feel utterly pointless. and it’s physical. it forces me to look outside myself, and not drown in all the things going on inside, all the things I can’t fix, all the things I can’t control, all the worries I have about what I did and didn’t do or what will or won’t happen.

I suck at waiting. especially when I don’t know exactly what I’m waiting for. I just know that I hope something is coming, anything other than silence, and I can’t help but wait for it. but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to do something. my brain and heart tell me I have to, this is too important not to, but there’s nothing more for me to do. and so I walk.

and today, it gets better. the air is freezing, but the sun lights up the path in golden, shining through ivy leaves. I begin to notice things about the world. things other than me and what’s inside. patchy snow on dirt and brush. slivers of ice in a puddle. vines as thick as my bicep twisting, hanging in a mass beside a tree. I remember climbing those vines. I remember sitting in hammocks and throwing gummies at friends. I remember playing the push game on a rock in the river, always losing but never minding. I remember polar plunging in February with a bunch of friends as crazy as I was. I felt so alive, pumped full of fizzy joy, electric. I miss being crazy. I miss feeling like I am home.

rocks and whushing water. dogs excited to see me. a thick pipe across a dry creek – I balance across. wooden bridges. paths branching off paths. crunch of gravel. quiet steps on dirt. smooth grey bark with white splotches – birch? ivy. lots and lots of it. a hollowed stump. a whole haven that exists with or without me. alone or with others. I snag a knitted hat with two braided tassels hanging from a tree peg. it was there yesterday too, so I don’t feel bad about taking it. I pick off the crunchy leaves… it’s warm and soft. my heart feels quieter. I take out the earphones, pray as I walk. like I’m talking to a friend, someone who cares about me. who understands me. I feel a closeness I haven’t felt in a while. I feel like I can trust Him, no matter what happens. He knows what my heart wants, and can do everything I hope and more, if that’s best. and He’s faithful. all the time. that’s all that matters.

I think about hope. about what I could compare it to. maybe it’s a sword, because it is so double-edged. sharp. maybe it is sunshine, or the comforting warmth that comes when I cup my hands around a mug of tea. something vital and beautiful and powerful. or maybe it is the cold that comes with a winter day, something you can’t avoid or let go of even as it hurts to hold on to. maybe it is both, the warm cup of tea and the cold gray day. maybe it’s a burr in the woods… you don’t notice you’ve picked it up, until it’s there sticking to your clothes. you can’t seem to get rid of it,  but its sharp prick on your skin reminds you of who you are and who you love. maybe hope is the smile of the person dearest to you. maybe it is memory. maybe it is dreams. maybe it’s your breath or my heartbeat.

I think it’s all of these things.

I think everything is more complicated than we think. and more simple.

I think that love makes all of these things worth it. even the things that feel impossible.

I think a lot of things.

but thinking them here, breathing fresh, cold air, as my feet move me through the forest and as music pumps blood through my body for me, is much better than doing it almost anywhere else.

longing for you

tries to split my body open

parting down the middle like a string bean

struggling out of my skin

like an animal scrabbling with blunted claws

what is it, what is it

my heart heaves, it cries

tell me what it is

this terrible thing burning me away from the inside

love, comes the answer from far away

white,  bright, full

looking down from high window

hush, my darling, hush

it is love

and there is nothing you can do

but endure

and my tears prick me

like a dagger to the chest

some nights, sadness dribbles down on me like rain on a roof.

some nights, it is a hot, wet blanket, heavy and suffocating.

some nights, it is nothingness. but as real as the air I breathe.

but always… there is missing you.

always, I wish I could lie next to you. look at the stars. try to match your breathing.

always, I wish I could hear you. talk about anything. everything. I’ll just sit and listen.

always, I wish I could reach out and touch you again. feel like we’re going to be okay.

I would be happy if I could have you some nights, for always.

and so on these nights, I am somehow, always, missing you.

I need you.

Do you know,

(You must know)

And does it matter?

If you don’t need me,

Then it doesn’t.