Fleeting bravery

More + more as I wake up each morning and watch the sun rise over the long, stretched out hills here, I am coming to the same conclusion.

All is fleeting.

This life is so momentary. So weighed down by time. It is hopeless and unromantic and ending. It is not all that there is though.
I have been saying that so much these days.
There is more though. It's true. There is an eternity. And we, even us pitiful little carpenter-lovers, we even sometimes forget that. So I can't blame them anymore. I can't really look down on them for being afraid. For not caring. For not trying. For giving up.
I understand now, the depths of their despair + heartache.
And I want to change it.

A desire to be able to speak more eloquently has slowly been blossoming in my heart. I write just fine, that I know, but I want to be able to talk too. I want to be able to make the sky even bend just a little to hear what I have to say.  I want my words to wrap around people's souls as they come out of my lips and to brush their cheeks and to offer comfort when I can't write it.
I want to speak life.
I was never very good with my mouth. Always stuttering or mumbling or not finding the syllables caught in the back of my throat and finally just swallowing them. But as my vision + purpose + passion have all broadened with the growing, learning woman that I am, I find myself more desperately in need of verbal beauty, a vocal cadence that is smooth and rhythmic and assuring, an ability that I don't have.
I stumbled my way through three speech classes thus far in my college career, and my teacher sought after me with a fierceness ever since the first day he read the words I wrote.
You need to talk more, he would say and write and email to me. You have so many good things to say. 
I can't, I finally told him halfway through our second quarter together. I'm just not that kind of girl.
And he looked at me and said something no one ever had before. Then you need to be her, because if you don't try, you're robbing people. 

You need to be her.

I was devastated for days afterwards. For the entire school year actually. I couldn't. I couldn't find my voice. I couldn't raise my hand. I couldn't tell people what I knew I should say.
I couldn't speak.
But now. His words have always been there, in the back of my mind tucked in the pocket of thingspeopletoldmethatireallyshouldnotforget. They are surfacing again, those things he said that at one time I thought were unkind. That unheeded advice. But they're not about school anymore. They are not about the things he said them about. I hear his voice, deep and caring and perfectly measured. His slight laugh behind each word even when nothing was funny. His presence and the manner he carried himself in. I hear all of that still.
But now it's about this.
It's about hope.

Knowing Jesus is not really something we should have the ability to hide from other people. And I want everyone to know, I want to tell them all, I want to say it with my voice.
This is not all that there is.
And then I want to say,
Would you like to know what else there is?
The greatest love story is hard to stifle. Not sharing the carpenter is like reading "Romeo and Juliet" and never telling anyone about it. It's like shoving "Tristan and Isolde" underneath your pillow whenever anyone else comes in to whisper goodnight. It's like finishing the last words of "Jane Eyre" and not crying.
It is impossible.

After my last class with that speech professor, he + I were alone in the classroom. It was almost the last time I spoke with him, only once more after that did we cross paths. I held an empty pan sticky with icing that had covered the cinnamon rolls I brought to share with the class and he sat on the edge of his desk with his hands on his knees and his blue eyes looked straight into mine with the engaging stare he begged everyone to use. You're a good student, he told me. I only nodded in response, because he ended on a high note and I knew he had more to say.
Be brave, he told me.
Okay, I said.

Now is my brave time. Now is my brave moment. I feel it in my bones. I can't keep Him to myself anymore. I have the best one, the sweetest of ever, the savior, and I can't keep Him to myself.
Because all is fleeting.
But this is not all that there is.