my dreams were too small

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