It’s like a pit in my stomach. I can feel it sit there, unable to be digested.
Two weeks.
Every minute seems to be filled with a different emotion, making my hours diverse and complicated, making the days exhausting. These fluctuating feelings do not respect my unconscious hours, as they have now begun invading my dreams. Late flights, forgotten items, and scenarios of being lost in Switzerland were on last night’s agenda.
What am I even doing?
Who am I to try to pull off a stunt like this? I am so underqualified. I am not nearly adventurous enough to pick up everything and just move to a foreign place. Try as I might, I cannot seem to rid myself of the American Christian subculture vestiges that seem to be so hazardous to the kind of relationships I seek to build in Germany. Can I really handle another round of suicides? Who am I to do this work? Who am I to be this person?
I remember sitting in the third row of the awful green colored pews in the chapel at Lincoln Christian University. My heart was worn beyond description by the events of that Spring of my first year in Seminary, but I managed to limp into the commencement service to cheer on a few acquaintances for their accomplishments. The address was given that day by a man who needed no introduction, because his last name bore a weight with it that silenced the hundreds of people in that room. Brian Lowery stepped up to the stage, the son of our beloved professor Bob Lowery who had died just a few weeks before.
“It’s a dance,” he said. “This life with Jesus is a dance. It is a constant movement back and forth between ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Here am I.’ It’s the dance of grit; it’s the dance of grace.”
His words swept over me like a wave. You are never really steady, never really solid. This dance–left, left, right, back–it asks you to keep moving, back and forth between these movements of faith and identity.
His words ring in my ears during these final weeks of preparation. I sway between moments of overwhelming inadequacy and a quiet faith that sees the way Gospel could bring so much hope and love to the lost and lonely, if only someone would go. I see people wandering through life and think “if only” until my heart is ablaze and I stand up and say “here am I, send me.”
Back and forth. It feels so confusing. This dance of grit, this dance of grace. My feet seem clumsy, but I think slowly I’m learning the pattern.
Left, left, right, back.
Who am I?
Here am I.
Still Wandering,
Tony