I entered my fourth decade this summer…a subtle shift that
crept up on me; one I’m not quite sure how to understand. Society tells me I’m a career woman now
that I’ve turned 30, an adult, a responsible person. Surely there should have been fireworks, or a gray hair, or
something to indicate a momentous change?
Instead I had an explosion of balloons and young Berea staffers,
thoughtfully throwing me a surprise party in my own camp infirmary waiting
room, in the same place I celebrated a twenty-second birthday and an NCLEX exam
passed eight years before. Time
stopped for a moment.
I feel like nothing has changed in ten years – I am still
giving my time in overflowing handfuls of packed summer weeks spent fixing
others, still wandering through markets in search of bookshelves to furnish yet
another apartment, still (if you would believe the hospital secretaries)
looking no older than the college students I teach.
Nothing has changed, and at the same time everything has
changed.
Had someone told my twenty-year-old self what to expect of
the next ten years, I would not have mocked or scoffed. But I might have gaped a bit,
incredulous, at the wild tale spun out before me, at the bits and handfuls I’ve
gathered to share on this blog, and so much more that never made it onto the
web but are instead carved permanently on the corners of my soul. It was not in me to doubt or deny, but
there are threads of the unknown and almost insane that I never would have
thought to weave in on my own.
I was shy and quiet and driven then, and my North Country
rugged values met Asian culture and dress standards in the deliberate grace of
a Sundanese dance, and in the awkward realizations that my eyes and hair and
identity documents would never match the culture of my heart. I had only just begun wearing clothes
that actually showed my figure, only glimpsed the realization that I was
expected to look people in the eye rather than stare at their feet
in a modest respect they could never understand. I was finding the balance of my own rhythm in a world I had
finally started to accept, even to call comfortable, but never to claim as
mine.
Mine were the barefoot walks of forests and streams. Mine were the muddied footpaths between
sawah and glittering sunsets in a
thousand nuanced colors, where the call to prayer echoed off volcanoes on every
side.
There was barely a hint of the emergency nurse in my college
student mind. No dreams of Africa,
of sailing the high seas, or of muddied land rover expeditions in search of
surgical patients. I knew two
languages, two lands, and my heart was already divided between two continents
and cultures. I knew the call of
God on my heart, and I stubbornly tried to hold what I found familiar along
with that call. I would have
settled, with no idea of the wonder and blessings I would have missed. The wonderful adventures of life I have
wholeheartedly embraced these last few years would have whispered past, unseen
and unknown.
I dreamed with the shy exuberance of youth, vivid and
uninformed. It’s not that my
dreams were wrong or sinful. They
were only small and shallow and naive; as I eagerly filled my own little cup
and looked ignorantly past the deep well God was digging for me. I could not see that my own dreams were
too small to hold all that God was planning, the careful and eternal weaving of
the One who holds the world together.
I ask sometimes, why life didn’t go the way I planned. But I cannot ask with the petulance of
a child, but instead with awed wonder at this lavish gift…why me? What have I done to deserve this?
And the answer is…absolutely nothing. Nothing more than to follow in
obedience and trust. And as I
follow and find delight in who God is, my own dreams and desires have been
molded and re-formed, and I pray they continue to change until I want nothing
more than to know Him and make Him known.
My life has not been all that I dreamed, these last ten
years. It’s been more. Oh, so much more. I cannot wait to see what the next ten
hold!
Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of
your heart. ~ Psalm 37:4
