Stillgood

In the morning, I wrote bold, courageous words: “We are not strong enough, physically, emotionally, spiritually; but it’s in the darkness of our broken-clay-pot-dead hearts that His light can shine.” But where were all my words by evening?

Nothing was wrong. Maybe it was the weather—just as the bright, early fall days reminded me of the exhilaration of just-arriving this time last year, the colder, darker walk by myself through the center of town made me think I’d traveled back to the time when loneliness and homesickness settled in. I stopped beneath a portico haunted by Michael Buble: Another summer day/ Has come and gone away/ In Paris and Rome/ But I wanna go home;/ May be surrounded by/ A million people I/ Still feel alone/I just wanna go home…

Maybe it was passing a beautiful weekend with fellow-Americans, laughing and talking and feeling free. But one must always come back from the mountains.

Carlo recently asked me why I wasn’t jumping in the middle of a group of young people to talk with them, and said he thought I wanted to leave America, but wasn’t happy when I was gone.

“No, I don’t want to leave, and I am happy while I’m gone,” I said. “But I think I do understand a little better what the Bible means about being strangers in the world now.”

Some of my friends here laughed at me when I told them I had just discovered the library. “But it’s two blocks from your house!” But they can’t understand the way I tip-toe through days and public streets hoping not to do anything wrong. I did know of the library’s existence earlier; but a million fears plagued me—fear of it being for university students only, or of foreigners having to go through extra steps—even banal fear of tripping past all those eyes of the living-statue students lounging elegantly along the wall.

But this morning there was joy. Joy in knowing the pleasure of God in Himself, in His goodness, in me.

Isn’t it a beautiful thing how God lets us speak for Him to each other? One of my favorite times this weekend, in all the time we spent talking about God, was when A was talking about a problem she was having, and I was listening, and thinking how pretty she was, and just told her so. It had no bearing on the subject, but was what she needed to hear at the moment; and what an awesome and humbling thing that He let me speak it. This morning someone said something nice to me that I didn’t even know I needed to hear; but it rang with the echoes of truth, of Someone who knows me better than I know myself.

This God—He is good.