We're here in the first becoming days of spring, and I can already feel the itch for warmer weather, for the promise of summer and adventure and romance and days where the sun doesn't go down in the sky, taking away all elegant ramblings about beginnings and endings and giving way to a beautiful, constant hope.
I've always had trouble with summer. Every year I get a little restless, a little uncomfortable, a little overwhelmed with the wide open spaces that stretch out before me, and at least for a little while I crave the comfortable confinement of winter.
But in this current season I'm in, summer sounds like a relief, a promise. Because I'm having trouble with this season too.
I remember someone saying to me during my first year at PRBI that you should stay in this place until you can answer these 3 questions about your faith (I don't remember what the questions were) and that this is a place where you really can't go wrong when choosing it.
I kind of held to that mindset when I decided to come back for a second year. I didn't know what I wanted to do, and I didn't feel totally released from PRBI yet.
This year I'm calling my wilderness season. Over and over it feels like I am repeatedly being slammed into the wall. I'm constantly fighting against something. I've encountered some continued breakthroughs, but I've also been tested in ways that have made me want to crumble on multiple occasions. Everything I thought I knew about myself was shaken, whether that's a good thing or not. And I feel it now, the release. There is an itch inside me, a pulling of "You were made for more than this."
I didn't ever imagine Bible college could be a wilderness place. It is supposed to be a place of richness, and growth. And yet it wasn't like that for me this year. And I'm learning to be ok with that. I'm learning the 'Bible school bubble', the exclusively Christian circle, isn't right for me right now. And that's ok.
I have Isaiah 52:11-12 on my wall. It was a verse handed to me by a friend during a study I did on wilderness, and I have 3 reminders written beside it. Leave but leave empty handed. leave clean. and don't rush.
And oh how I want to rush. part of me reasons that if I can change my environment, I can change my spiritual season, that once I leave this place the hard work of the desert will give way to the beautiful richness that I've been creating. But I don't think its that easy.
I think that once I leave this place, there will be a different kind of hard. My mind is already filled with worries for life beyond here as I stress about finding a job and finding a way to get the training I want and making my dream job a reality.
I'm learning there is still work left to be done here, as much as I want to avoid that work. There are people I need to forgive, commitments that need to be carried out, work that has to be done so that when I leave this place I can leave clean.