Smallish.

Quite frankly I don't know how to put this. Summer is here, and summer is not here. I've never felt this way about May before. It's difficult to express the learning made manifest in me, the dreams budding, the experiences had, and the sweetness of waiting for what's to come. Most of it happened in May though. May was never a favorite of mine before now. Lavender colored swollen clouds, warm nights, much laughter, and long travels have all changed that for me.
Now I like May.
Maybe I even love her.

Slowly I've reached the cusp of realizing and sifting through what is important and what is not. I think so often that we tell ourselves, I will begin living after this step. My life will start after high school. My life will start after college. My life will start after I get married. My life will start after my children are grown. My life will start after I finish thirty years at a nine to five job and I retire. My life will start later. I will begin living tomorrow. But that is all a lie. That is just saying, My life will start when I'm dead. And I used to think like that. Like I wasn't really living, like I was being robbed of something until I completed all the necessary steps.
I'm done telling myself that.
I have learned that life and experiences and discoveries are just as sweet and deep and full in any state of being that I am in. I woke up this morning though, and I thought, even if I knew this, but I didn't have Jesus, I would be miserable. Eternity changes your whole perspective.

I was thinking yesterday about how controversial and contradictory Christianity is. My pastor preached yesterday on 1 Corinthians and how God's whole purpose is to use the weak and less noble and frightened and seemingly imperfect to prove His point and save those who dare to be saved. Belief in Jesus is the opposite of what people think it should be. We are just a number of sinners who found grace and believe in what could be a fairytale. And some of it doesn't make sense, but what makes even less sense, is that it's not supposed to.
We aren't supposed to understand everything.
My mind of course wanted to fight that yesterday. So I sat there, and I relished it instead. I have never felt a more perfect peace than within that moment.
I don't need to know everything.
It was when I whispered that under my breath, and I let it all go, that was when I was most thankful perhaps in ever. As a follower of my carpenter for years, I have always felt the demand to know everything about the gospel and the Bible and doctrine and theology. For the longest time, I have been weighted down by the pressure to know. To understand. To get it. To explain it. Because this is a war, and the best warriors are the ones who fight with all they are.
The best warriors are the ones who know everything.
God ripped that out of me yesterday. Not even slowly, He did it with a quick flick of his wrist, and it hurt because it was branded on my forearm underneath my elbow. But after, oh afterwards. Peace like that I ache to feel always.
I'm one of those warriors who falls into the traps of her enemy so easily. Not anymore though. Because I am liberated. I am free.
I don't need to understand everything.

There's a verse in Jeremiah that talks about how we shall not be few. About how we shall not be small. And now I know that it's not even up to us to be many and to be large. It's not our call to grow ourselves and be convinced that we did it.
We do nothing.
Nothing, but listen and heed His words and obey and love. And that's what I will do. Because my life didn't start this morning. It didn't start yesterday, or even the day before that. It started almost twenty-two years ago now.
And my call has been to live it ever since.

I am no longer worried about being few and small.

¹⁹ And out of them shall proceed thanksgiving and the voice of them that make merry: and I will multiply them, and they shall not be few; I will also glorify them, and they shall not be small.
Jeremiah 30