Season 4, Episode 4: "An Open Letter..."

So I used to write for the Odyssey. If you didn't know, don't worry, I only held onto the position for about a semester and a half before I realized I didn't have enough time for a structured piece every week that wasn't based on my own musings. Anyhow...that's a thing that I did, and as I was writing this up, the "open letter" format felt like a good title. I don't know who it's for, really. It's certainly not for freshman or sophomore year me, or junior semester me, or senior me--she's already lived these things, and to be blunt, she's not around anymore, these words and her won't ever cross paths. 

Instead, I'd posit that this is an open letter to future me. I don't know when it'll happen, or why, or what the circumstances will be, but sometime in the future, some slightly-closer-to-adulthood version of myself will open up my blog and read through some of my past entries. She'll smile as she reads about her freshman year self really learning about courage for the first time, and then beam as she reads the piece that she was proudest of, a post about the intersection of that courage and fear. She'll get to the summer of 2018 and brace herself for the onslaught of memories, the nights spent memorizing verses by the bay, dancing in the street in front of the mission house, crying and praying and journaling and painting and baking and laughing and playing games and living in a community that she wishes she had appreciated fully while she was still there. She'll wade through the hesitant posts that come after that, and suddenly come upon this one and pause. And then something will hit her, as she recalls what was going through her head when she wrote this. 

It was Sunday April 7th, she was sitting cross-legged on her bed as she stared up at her white board, actively choosing to not start any work yet. She noted the words on her white board and felt struck by them for a moment, breathing in the scent of her raspberry candle and only occasionally remembering to exhale as the corner of her mouth turned up in a hint of a smile. She decided to take a photo, and noticed that she took a nearly identical one at the beginning of the semester, in January of 2019. Her smile broadened as she opened up the notes app to take down some thoughts. 

"you are my battle-shield, sword for the fight. you are my dignity, you're my delight."

This semester has been a strange one all around. It's nothing like I expected it to be. I’ve been finding myself, over and over again, in places where I’d forgotten I belonged—in reading, in singing, in learning and loving what I have the brilliant opportunity to do, in being on my own--but not alone.

I took this picture days after coming back from Israel. I didn’t know what this year would look like, or feel like, or how exactly I’d start preparing for my future. Heck, I walked into the semester as a junior and within a month became a senior (in case we haven't talked in a bit, surprise! I'm graduating early!). 

The only thing I thought I knew was that it was going to hurt. I've loved my college experience, but I've learned that growth isn't easy, nor is change. To be fair, I don't think either of them is meant to be, but the difficulty of each tends to be hand in hand with some level of pain. Someone once described emotional growth to me with the analogy of a muscle, how it has to be torn in order to be knit together again, but becomes bigger and stronger through the process. I've always held that theory to be correct, because that's what I always seemed to have lived. An experience would hurt me or challenge me, and I would grow from it. 

That's all fine, (and if I'm being honest, it seems a bit too "sunshine and rainbows" for me, goodness knows I'm not the world's biggest optimist) but I think there's more to growth that I hadn't really ever accounted for. When I first heard that analogy, I rather tacitly accepted it, not knowing all that much about physiology, but at least enough to know that the general process sounded right. Do you know what no one ever told me? The growth happens in the rest. 

Currently, I'm sitting on my bed cross-legged and experiencing a dull ache in my backside (I swear this isn't TMI it'll make sense in a minute). Why? Because yesterday, when I was at the gym, I incorporated squats and lunges into my workout. I'm sore because I tore the muscles, and now, in the resting period, they're being rebuilt. 

Now this isn't going to be a post where I write about why rest is great, because I've done a bit of that, and anyhow, if you want to hear more about that, come out to my Ted Talk about it. (Shameless plug, April 18th 7:00-9:30 PM in Hoff Theater). Instead, I just wanted to make some observations about how different this whole semester has been from what I had expected (in many cases because of that rest). 

The way this semester has gone, or even this year...None of it was how I expected to grow. I didn’t see myself here last April, there's no way I could have predicted it. I saw different victories and fewer losses—but the ones that have occurred have been even better and more formative than I could have imagined. Victories are sweeter, losses have taught me things (even if sometimes, the lesson was just to learn how to lose). 

I told myself it was going to hurt, but I didn't know I was actually going to come out of that hurt better for having experienced it. The things that have been painful were just that: painful, and hard, and messy (but isn't that what they always are?). There have been long nights where I've stayed up eating cereal until two in the morning to get work done, and nights where I've crashed at 7pm because I'm positive I've burned myself out and I have a fever. And sure, if I'm being honest, those have been poor days. I've finally given up on perfect, (and thank God for that) and admitting that sometimes a day is just a bit too long, or that there's just a bit too much to do is an alright thing to do. 

But there's been this really cool thing that I've seen happening over the course of this semester, and while I know it's not over yet, it's still neat for me to both experience and observe. In choosing to rest (see Season 4, Episode 2, "I'm also attempting to try a pretty radical schedule of rest...to make a distinct effort to put away my laptop, journals, test prep books, and highlighters for 24 hours to be able to breathe, relax, and recalibrate myself for the next week.") I've given myself time to process things and to re-introduce things that I love into my life (see: baking). 

Processing things as they occur means I'm not shoving aside my emotional responses to things until I don't know how to contain them anymore, it means smaller reactions, a willingness to extend grace (to others and to myself), and an overall outlook that's more positive and less stressed. I told my mom a few weeks back, when recounting some event/test/occasion that was coming up and causing me some stress, that it was the first time that I had actually felt worried the entire semester (another abnormality for me, normally my inclination to overthink everything leads to a substantial list of worries), and that even that level of worry was minute and manageable. 

I realized that my relationship with God doesn't have to look as smooth or as flat as anyone else's around me. Just because the person next to me appears to be living the perfect life doesn't mean that I can't be mad about injustice in the Church, or that I'm not allowed to be taking my relationship at a slower pace right now. There's a whole post to be written about the conditioning behind that statement, but that's for another time, suffice it to say I've realized that my spiritual journey wasn't written to be at 120 beats per minute at a 4/4 tempo. Its pace will ebb and flow, and sometimes, it'll look like me staying up late in the evenings to analyze that passage just a little bit longer, while other times it'll be me gently repeating to myself that I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Anywhere on that spectrum is just fine, so long as I love the Lord with my whole heart, mind, soul, and strength. 

Every 4 months or so, the University of Maryland prompts its students to change their University account passwords. For the past three years, I've selected passwords that have prompted me to remember a Bible verse, so I would think about it and have it in my head for the rest of the day. In the past, I've pulled from some of my absolute favorites: Psalm 46, Joshua 1:9, Romans 1:16, but this semester, I decided on Hebrews 12:2. 

It reads (in the 1984 NIV translation that I first memorized it in): 

"Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfector of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God."

And no, for all of you curious, I did not just give you my university password. 

When I was trying to figure out what verse I wanted to be reminded of for what's left of my time at Maryland, though, this was the only one that really fit. As I'm looking towards the future, making tentative plans and spreadsheets about where I want to go and what I want to do, the call to action in this verse seems really really impactful to me. Once the author introduces Jesus, we learn more about his character, which is (obviously) relevant, but for what I'm talking about, I want to focus on those first seven words. 

"Let us fix our eyes on Jesus."

As important as those seven words are, understanding their context is just as crucial. In verse one, the author writes "Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles us, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us." 

So we're being told to throw off things that would hold us back or pull us down and run the course set before us. And then we're told to fix our eyes on Jesus. I've never liked running. A brief stint in cross country in high school was the nail in the coffin for me and the sport, and I parted ways with it after my senior year with few regrets. But I do remember what it was like for me to go running for long periods of time. When I was training and told to run at home, I'd cross my backyard and go to the path behind my house, throw in some headphones and start going. 

I knew the path well enough to know where the twists and turns were, so I rarely felt compelled to stare at the ground while running, instead choosing to look around me, and more often than not, up. Looking at the sky (or the ceiling) has always been pretty common practice for me when I run, even going back all the way to elementary school where I would track my progress by counting how long it took me to get from one pole crossing our gymnasium ceiling to the next. 

It was a way to distract myself from the fact that I was doing something I didn't like. I focused my gaze on something more appealing than the current task at hand. When I grew older and was running behind my house, it was the changing leaves on the trees around me, the various birds sitting at a pond, the sky darkening and lightning looming in the distance. But these verses actually seem to imply the opposite approach, especially when you look at verse three.

"Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart."

So to recap, again:

First, we're told to go for a run, and to get rid of anything that could get in our way.

Second, we're told to fix our eyes on Jesus.

Third, we're told not just to fix our eyes on Jesus, but to consider him.

Why is that relevant? Because to me, that seems like a pretty direct order to not zone out while going on your daily run. 

I'm running a 5k in 6 days (and the closer it gets the more sad I get about the fact that I'm running it lol) and every time I've sat down to do any sort of preparation, one of the biggest questions I've asked myself is "how am I going to get through this run?" -- not because I don't think I'm capable of running for a half hour, but because I know I'm going to need something good to distract me from the fact that I'm doing it willingly for the first time in years. These verses fly in the face of that notion, and instead challenge me to run the race before me, while focusing on and considering Jesus, and throwing off the things that could distract me. 

Hot take here, but I'm going to guess our author isn't just talking about my 5k. The term "race" is referred to in other areas of the Bible in reference to a person's lifespan (see 2 Timothy 4:7 with "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith") and once you know that context, you've probably got a pretty decent idea of where I'm going with this.

As I said earlier, I don't quite know what's next for me. I'm approaching graduation with a speed that I hadn't anticipated back in January, I seem to have options (which for some reason is scarier than having none at all?) to choose between of where I want to go and what I want to do, and as I'm time managing the heck out of this semester, I've still (somehow) found enough time to procrastinate reading case law and write a blog post instead.

But I look up, every once in a while. I see the white board on my wall.

"You are my battle-shield, sword for the fight. You are my dignity, you're my delight."

Fixing my eyes on Jesus means recognizing what those words say. It's learning and appreciating the battle that was fought for me, and knowing that the same warrior who saved me then has my back now. It's acknowledging that all of my accomplishments, everything that I've ever worked for, belongs to God. It's knowing that with all of those things or with none of them at all, I'd still be his daughter, and that there's dignity in holding that as my identity. But most of all, it's being delighted with and delighting in God because He is good.

If that's not a glorious reason to fix my eyes on Jesus, then I don't know what is. I've been looking up more, fixing my eyes more, delighting more this semester, and it's been a joy. But there's even more joy ahead, just as there are changes in the wind, and I'm doing my best to patiently wait and see what those changes and that joy will bring.

If you've made it this far, I appreciate you (not only is this a bit lengthy, but I also didn't use many pictures so seriously, if you're reading this, you're a champ). Thanks for choosing to read these thoughts, as personal and sometimes awkward as they are. I hope you've enjoyed.

Signing Off,

Amanda