No Better Place

I want to say something and I'm not sure what it is. When this happens I write until it comes out; it's worked before, so I'll give it a shot here.

Whether home at school or home at home, one thing is becoming clearer and clearer as I get older:
I am not Home yet, not of this world, not meant to stay here.
There is a part of my heart that hurts when I think about it, but it is a hurt that I cannot and must not assuage.
I want to live my life so that I can look back from Home and say, "That was a good ride."

There's a lot that I want with this Life. It's a precious, sacred thing, and I try hard to appreciate it. Life comes from God, the natural result of the immensity of Love that He is. Such a Love cannot but cause new life to spring into being, for Love is of all other things creative. I want to fall in love, get married, have kids, go, do, be, work, walk, run, think, fly.
But I do not wish to forget why I am here.
I am here to do as He commands.
I am here to take the Love that created me, that created all of us, and hold it out with both hands to a world that has already rejected it.
It sounds...futile. It sounds like it will be painful. But I am finding that things that are worthwhile tend to bring pain with them, at least for a time. The flesh tends to cringe at the thought of the natural consequences that come with Being His. I think though that I am done listening to the flesh.

This is an excerpt from my journal, back in March:
"Let me be an invisible conduit, an unseen vessel for You....Let my name be coupled with Yours; let the two be inseparable. Let me be immersed, utterly submerged, in You....May the only impression I leave be one of You: make me invisible...
If I am extinguished, so be it. They do not notice the wick, only the flame."

I can't wait to get Home. Come with me. There's room.

I Don't Care if This is a Stupid Reason

Everytime I hit a dry spot, everytime I start to wonder if I can keep going, He goes and does something that from this vantage point looks nothing short of spectacular.

Like this.

There's this little boy I've been praying for. A friend's nephew. Born eight weeks premature with a defective heart. Put, as a last resort, on a machine that pumps the blood throughout the body so that the weak heart chambers need not try to maintain blood pressure. A machine that at the most is supposed to keep its patient alive for two weeks.
This little boy was on it for four weeks.
It got so that I dreaded hearing from my friend. It's not a reaction I'm proud of, but it's one I'm prone to, as a human who struggles at times with what I see as compared to what I know. I kept praying. At times it was the formulaic prayer of one who prays from a sense of duty, the kind of prayer that you have to choke past the boulder in your throat because part of you is screaming accusations at the other part of you (accusations that you do your best to ignore but which sound and awful lot like "hypocrite", "doubter", and "faithless"). And then there were the prayers that were borne of a quiet, desperate trust in the Creator of that tiny, weak heart. Sometimes I couldn't tell the difference.
I dreaded hearing from him. There was a battle raging internally. I knew he was past some point of recovery. I knew he had been on the machine for too long. I knew it.
I knew God could heal him. I knew I believed for a reason. I knew that whatever happened, God would still be sovereign. I knew it. So some days I prayed. Somedays, I tried very hard not to think about it.
The other day I got this call from my friend.
The baby got a heart.
After hanging onto life for far longer than he should have been able to, he got a heart.
I wish I could tell you that I knew it would happen. But only part of me did. It is a sweet, sweet victory. The child will live, and grow, and thrive. I know because I am still praying for him. That baby does not and most likely never will know who I am; that's okay.

I think what I'm trying to say is, I think maybe God saved that little one in part for my sake. Seen in black and white that looks awful, cold, and selfish. The baby is alive because God has some plan for his life that I do not and cannot know. But maybe--
Maybe God answers our prayers to give us something of His to hold onto.

And that's what I was thinking about. And it makes me trust Him more.
(Refer to the title of this post.)