Convenience

I was expecting this. Honestly, I'm not sure what to say. It's the strangest thing in the world to be home. I am so independent. It's one of the best places in the world... home. Under the same roof as my family. The people I would die for a thousand times and then some. I love sleeping in the same room as my sisters. Some of them... the others are in the room across the hall. I love when Zach bangs on the wall because Cal and Soph and I are too loud in the middle of the night.

I love walking down the stairs when I'm just barely awake and finding the little girls on the benches at the bar eating bowels of cereal in the morning. I love my piano room, and playing and singing songs that overflow from the unshed tears and the unvoiced laughter, and the unspoken dreams and thoughts of my innermost parts, and watching as my baby sisters creak open the door, and sneak on to the couch to listen. They think I don't see them, but I do.

I remember when Lena and Melodi were babies. Literally a week old or so. And we would all hold them and play the piano. Zach and Caleigh and I took it upon ourselves to expose our family members at the earliest ages possible to music. We wanted them to know it. We wanted them to love it. And they do. They all play. They all sing. And to my great happiness, they love to write. I love watching Olivia write in her journals I buy her. They copy us, and it's beautiful. Even if they don't love it forever, for now, I love that they enjoy music and writing, and art. Expression. Putting color to the unseen. Beauty.

So, you see... I'm just in such a strange place in my heart. In my life. I love this, but it's frustrating to be contained in a dependent state.

If you're keeping up with my blogs, you likely see how I constantly repeat that fact that I am only 20 years old... it's really just so strange. I, the queen of using words all the time... am at a loss for how to describe what this feels like right now. To be 20, the same age as all my friends who are only just going to be juniors at Greenville next Fall... and that's what I was two years ago. It's so strange, my friends.

Some things I've learned in this rather odd journey of being a girl, maybe a woman, who knows exactly what I want more often than not... life goes on. God gives and takes away. He is always Good. He is always loving on me so fully I cannot comprehend it. Any desires and dreams I have are only faint reflections of how much, how deeply, how innately I fully desire God... things just get distorted. It's not that I exactly "look for love in all the wrong places." It's that I don't realize how innately I really do desire God. How innately every human being does.

All of that energy of desiring things, and people... it's just a reflection, or a misdirection of the arrows shot from the bow on my shoulders as I aim from my heart.

And this... we never really know. We expect that when we graduate from high school, we should know what we're gonna do in college. But we don't. We expect that when we're done our first year of college, we're gonna just know the ropes. But we don't. There's more. We expect that graduating from college means we know who we're going to spend our lives with, and what job we'll have for the rest of time, and where we'll live once and for all. But we don't.

We're all just living life. Figuring things out as the answers come. But they don't always come when we ask for the answers. So often they come while we're on to the next questions. Convenience is but a world of our imagination.

And so I end with this. I battle my imagination right now. I'm faced with reality, and much of it is absolutely wonderfully exciting. The mean time is the space between now and then. And I fully wish I were in the "then." I cannot wait for Nashville. I can't wait to embrace my independence again. I love it. But the purgatory I feel right now is beautiful though it is painful as well. And a time God is happy, and glad to give me.

So that's it. Reality knocks.