Yesterday was a weirdly emotional day for me. Like I mentioned last week, it was the one-year anniversary of my move to New York. The move was actually a two-day event (the drive from Alabama is about fifteen hours and neither my mom nor I have a death wish), but yesterday, July 13, was the day Joe, Mom and I drove into the city and moved me into my apartment. So I spent some time yesterday reflecting on the past year and on how I felt that day.
     How do you know when you’ve made the right decision about something? I used to think it was when I had an overwhelming sense of peace about the choice I’d made. Did I feel peaceful on the drive from Birmingham to New York? ABSOLUTELY NOT. Even now, an entire year later, thinking about it makes my stomach tie up in knots and my throat thicken with tears. I have never before felt such intense physical pain from an emotional event. As we drove further from my home, my friends, and my family, I felt like I was being torn in two. I would feel excitement one minute and dread the next, and I cried pretty much the whole way. I had said many goodbyes over the past week, and just that morning I had said a goodbye that I thought would literally break my heart into pieces and leave them lying there on the street. But I had made this decision weeks ago, with help from people I trusted implicity, and I knew it was the right choice. As the U-Haul rumbled across the country with three people stuffed into the front seat, did I feel peace? No–not in the way I always thought peace would feel. 
     Maybe that’s one of the most important and constant things I’ve been taught over the past year: the vision versus the reality. After my schooling ended, I thought that once I made a decision about the next step, I would feel peace and then just forge happily ahead with the next step. That mentality assumes that the next step doesn’t have its own set of issues. 
    But I kept going. At some point I guess I believed that I would know I had made the right decision once I got to the city and everything went well–that would be my confirmation. I would have loved for my “peace” to have involved a sign in front of my face or a notice sent on a postcard with a simple note, “You’re doing the right thing. Peace, God.” But on the highway, and for pretty much every moment since, my peace has been different. Not so settled and definitive. I’ve wondered, I’ve doubted, especially when things have been rough (and there has been plenty of that). But beneath it all, I’ve known. The knowing isn’t constant, though; it only comes from staying close to the source of it. I’ve been apportioned just enough assurance to keep me in his presence asking for more. Too much more, and I’d run off on my own. I moved to New York to become more independent; thank God I’m more dependent than ever.
     So my peace turned out to be more like questioning and my independence more like reliance. He has changed my idea of what things should look like. In his grace, he has allowed me a vision that is so much bigger, more complicated, better, and more incomprehensible than I imagined. 
     It’s been a waiting period. New York is such a transitional city; everyone seems to be living here until the rest of their lives begin. I’m no different. If you had told me ten years ago that, at twenty-eight, this would be my life, I would have laughed–then gotten really, really scared. I expected a much different picture. But he has shown me that there can be so much more to the picture than I had in mind. I’ve been surrounded by people who got just what they wanted when they wanted it–the job, the relationship, the family. Some of the people I work with every day have the money and connections to make things happen exactly the way they want. It’s not always a pretty picture. 
     My idea of love involved words like forever and “I do”; visions of romantic dinners and faces smiling with the joy of wishes granted. Now I hear words like sacrifice and “No” and see faces marked with the hope and tension of requests not yet filled, and I know that this can be love too.
     My picture of marriage contained a white dress and sparkling ring; a big house and beautiful children; needs met and complete security. Now I see that the promise in front of the crowd is the easiest part. True marriage happens only after the days when you’ve had every reason to say “I don’t anymore” and yet you do stay. Security isn’t a ring or a fancy alarm system; it is a commitment and a choice to believe in the face of unmet needs and unfulfilled potential.
     I’ve been waiting in the past year and over my whole life for a vision to unfold–my vision. It’s taken some time (and is still going on), but that vision has to be changed for the new, better one to replace it. There is a gulf, the size of which I’m only beginning to realize, between the way I think things should look and the way they actually should be. That gulf has some similarity to the three days it took between the moment the world turned dark and the moment the stone was rolled away from the tomb. Had I been there then, what would I have done: cried in despair over the one who had died and failed me within minutes of having to wait in darkness? In his merciful modification of my paltry vision, he is making me into someone who would have waited, believing in the midst of unfulfilled prophecy, knowing that despite the way things looked, he is Who he says he is and he will do what he has promised. It may not look like what I thought it would–and thank God if it doesn’t. There were no trumpets, no fanfare when it actually happened. He just walked out of the tomb. The point is, the tomb is empty. He is the God of his vision, not mine.

 

To one who waits, all things reveal themselves, so long as you have the courage not to deny in the darkness what you have seen in the light. –Coventry Patmore