this is what He meant.

“what you spoke is now unfolding”
—elevation worship, Fullness 

Will you believe that of this season?

That was his question to me, driving to work this morning, singing and eyes flooding with tears, yet somehow (miraculously) not streaming and blinding me. Will you believe it?

I Voxered a friend later in the day and almost started crying again as I relayed that story to her. I’m having trouble believing that, I said. That this is what he meant. 

We’ve walked through hard things. Not knowing what our dreams were, then knowing what they were and not know what to do with them… 

I’m on the other side of it, but I’m having trouble believing that this is what God meant. 

Like believing that, that this is what he meant. Especially when it doesn’t feel like it to me sometimes and I have lived in a constant state of stress and have struggled to really just trust that that’s what this is. 

This is what he meant. 

All those months of day-dreaming and journaling. This is what he foresaw.

All those days spent pouring over pages documents and dreaming of doing something with them. This is what he dreamt for me. 

This season is no accident and no interruption. This is what he planned.

It is not foolish for me to be here, in a marketing job without a marketing degree. This is what he intended.

It’s not a mistake or a miscalculation. This is what he was building towards.

This is what he meant. 

It looks absolutely nothing like I expected it to. It physically hurts to think back to what I thought my life would be about post-India. Because that is just so not the case. I’m not a freelance writer, working on my MFA, living in New York or London. And I may never be any of those things. 

But I am learning more than I ever thought I would. I’m digging into Jesus and myself and life on my own, not in India, etc. I am in a job that I do, most days, enjoy, even with its craziness and stress and hardness. I am in a city I love, slowly building community and bearing up under burdens by letting others in on them. I have gotten to meet people and be friends with internet-friends and friends-of-friends. I have been able to rest in a purposefully lonely setting and nest in a one-bedroom apartment that I dearly love and call home. I’m learning and I’m living. That in and of itself would be enough.

But God’s doing so much more than that.

He’s speaking and moving. He’s showing me all these pieces of my heart that feel all shattered again, not to laugh at my repeated distress but to invite me to see what he can do with pieces. Because he’s not the God of pieces, but the God of wholeness. He’s helping me to lean into him, not because I have to, but because I want to. I need him. Desperately.

A few weeks ago now, a dear acquaintance on Insta tagged me in a post because she was doing a personal retreat, something I had encouraged her and a few other girls at ILC to do while I was at debrief and they were finishing up training. We messaged back and forth a few times, but her words still stick out to me: You’re so brave for moving back and settling back into America. You’re so brave. Those three words are so foreign and abnormal to me, I can’t even tell you. 

But I’m learning how to own them. To believe them. 

And it also takes guts to believe these same truths about the ground on which I stand. To believe that this is what he meant in all those dreams and hopes and expectations. My friend whom I was speaking to this morning recorded her messages last week to me with such tangible joy and hope and excitement — as someone not just living on the other side of the psalm-126-level dreams and shattering, but believing that that is indeed where she is: on the other side.

If I'm honest with you, I’m having trouble believing that I’m on the other side.

And part of that, of course, is because I’m not fully on the other side. I’m transitioning and still culture-shocking and everything involved in that. And that’s still going to be a part of my story for this season. It just is. But we’re at that hinge of psalm 126, and I want to live like it says, “We are one happy people!” It keeps joy central even when sorrow curtails both sides of it. Only God can do that. But it starts with my trust and hope in the fact that this, right here, with second-shattering and what-the-heck-kinda-season-is-this realities all mixed in — this is what he meant. When he said there would be another side, another field, another new thing to come. This is what he meant. He may not have told me that it involved shattering again. Or a crazy provided and secure job. But he did tell me that there would be another day. Days for dreams fulfilled and heart lifted. This is what he meant.