The Lord is my Shepherd

The weather finally made up its mind to act like summer, and we have begun to—not bake, because that requires dry heat—but steam, in the sultry humidity that’s only possible in a city on a river on a peninsula. But I enjoy the icy stabs of reality that come with summer when we’ve all melted off some of our superficiality. In the winter we cover up and try to move as quickly as possible from one building to another, lost in individuality, but in summer we unite in our quest to escape.

With every change of season I’m hit with a new wave of homesickness. At least the seasons will be my excuse. Maybe because they remind me of the transitory nature of life, my inability to hold onto moments, people. Maybe because I have memories associated with seasons. Summer is for barbecue and mowing grass and baseball and root beer floats. I don’t have those here.

Although I do have root beer, because one of the families from our team has just arrived and brought me some. Some people have kindly asked me if it’s easier being here with a team. And I think it’s better, but in some ways harder. My nostalgia can’t sink as deep and fester under the surface like it did when I was here alone, but it is pricked more often in seeing families (that aren’t mine), in having our identity in common but not here. I’m not allowed to forget.

I pulled out my hymnbook this morning, and quickly started crying. Those words have comforted and encouraged me so often, and the church that I sang them in has given me so much love. I have found comfort sitting at the piano and playing through the hymns, trying to improvise (I wonder if that’s related to provare, to try). But I don’t (even) have a piano now.

I don’t like admitting to being homesick. It makes me vulnerable, and I don’t like being vulnerable, admitting weakness. I want to be tough, to not need anyone or anything. But only God is self-sufficient, and I ought to know by now that I’m not God.

So I walk through days of twilights

Living in a lack

And always looking back.

The Italian way to say, “I miss…” is more like, “This is missing to me…I am without this…it is lacking in my life.” It is a statement of fact.

This is the problem with my desires. They very quickly go from descriptive to proscriptive, implying that something is wrong because I don’t have what I want. If one takes the word want in its older sense (to lack something necessary) that phrase is incredibly arrogant, as if I am telling God that He has not given me what is necessary for my happiness, and that my happiness is the only thing that matters to me and ought to matter to Him. In other words, He doesn’t know what is good. He isn’t good.

And I am like a baby screaming IwantIwantIwantIwant instead of like “a weaned child with its mother,” quiet, not making demands.

The important thing is not how I feel, but what I do. I don’t think it’s an accident that my Bible reading came from Philippians 3 this morning. “I count all things as loss…in order that I may know Him, and be found in Him.”

I can only be found in Him if I lose myself first.

Nulla mi manchera’. It’s a promise, a statement of hope, a commitment to faith. Nothing will be lacking to me. Nothing will be missing. There is nothing lost.

I shall not want.