Little towns and big cities.

Moderation has never been strength of mine. I’ve always accused my brother of being an extremely black and white person without ever considering myself to be one. Extreme people find themselves in an interesting situation; they have the ability to do both amazing things as well as amazingly stupid things. This basically sums up the cycle of my life. The worst times of my life have been when I’m just stuck between the two, dabbling in things that I know I shouldn’t be but wanting desperately to do good. Yuck. I don’t even like the think about it.

My move from Petaluma to L.A. is a good symbol of my knack for finding polar opposites. Petaluma is a small little town, the kind of place where even in this day and age people still are in love with the same person from their first days of junior high to the day they graduate high school. L.A. is the kind of place where people are in love for about 6 hours before they get bored and move on. If you go to USC you can cut that time frame in half. I think that all these changes have just made me somewhat numb to having stances on things that I used to see in black and white. There are so many things that I cannot even begin to figure out because they simply were not issues in Petaluma. I miss that. That’s all.

Flashbacks and promises.

Music has the amazing ability to send you back to very specific phases or events of the past in a startling and very real way. I recently made a 400-mile trek from Los Angeles to the Bay Area to visit my parents and had one of these musical out of body experiences somewhere between Fresno and San Francisco (it all looks the same…). I sat in my car listening to the same songs on repeat until I thought I was going to rear end someone just for excitement and realized it was probably time to shuffle. I shuffled and lo and behold a song that I was obsessed with at exactly this time last year slowly penetrated my brain and sent me back to June of 2009.

Going back in time can be such a weird experience. Anyone who says it’s not possible has never experienced the power of music. Suddenly I was back in the hotel room that I stayed in with my roommate and her parents while apartment hunting for the place that would be my first home in Los Angeles. I remember thinking at the time that it was so strange that it was gloomy in L.A. in June. I remember my roommate’s dad making us move out of our first apartment because it was in the ghetto. It was. We were stupid. I remember calling my mom and telling her that I would need twice as much money for rent as she had promised if she didn’t want me to get shot; that might have been an exaggeration. I was stupid.

Life is so beautiful, so unexpectedly beautiful. Things didn’t end up working out in my first apartment; we both ended up moving out six months before our lease was up. I now go to USC but I moved to L.A. to go to UCLA. Never in a million years would I have told you that I would be living in a fraternity for the summer of 2010 and loving it. Never would I have picked USC out as my dream school, but it is. That’s what’s crazy about how God designs things in our life; he sends us all over the place just to remind us that he knows us better than we know ourselves. All 400 miles of my drive were spent just thanking God for the life that he has given me. There isn’t one single thing that I would change in my life. Sometimes I feel like I might literally explode from happiness or that if I get even one more blessing I’m just going to die. I realize that life is full of seasons and that struggle and hardship are probably just around the corner but I can’t help but just be blown away by the way God holds true to His promises.

The Saturday In Between

As a general rule of thumb, I hate being in between things. Right now there are a couple different things in my life that I am metaphorically “in between.” I’m in between coming to USC next year or not, between pursuing a professional career after college or entering full-time ministry, and at any one moment throughout my day between have a peace that surpasses understanding or giving in and letting that terrifying grip of anxiety and fear take over my life.

I woke up today really angry with myself. Yesterday was Good Friday, one of the most important days of the year for the Christian faith, and I did not do a single thing all day to even recognize that the Creator of the universe died an excruciating death because He loved us, because He loved me. I’m sitting here writing this on the Saturday in between Jesus’ death and resurrection. I can’t help but feel that today is more than just a little symbolic of this season of my life. I can focus on yesterday, on my own sin of selfishness and immaturity, or even on the sin of humanity that nailed Christ to the tree, or I can choose to look to tomorrow, Sunday and remember that God is alive and He’s taking care of everything.

Looking backwards at Friday brings anxiety and frustration and will put you in that nauseating cycle of guilt and sin. Looking forward to Sunday will bring hope and peace and the reminder that you are not alone. The end has already been decided. I might get into USC; I might not. The good news is that it really doesn’t matter. My senior quote in high school was “I do not know what the future holds but I know who holds the future.” How ironic that I chose that quote at that time of my life; at that point I had my future all mapped out in my head. Two years later I’m sitting here in a city that I once said I would never live in, praying that I get into a school I grew up detesting. I guess I wrote all this just to say that I’m learning how to accept that feeling of “the Saturday in between.”

On my new reality.

Growing up in a small town, you don’t get very many “fresh starts.” If you pee your pants in kindergarten it WILL be brought up in your sophomore history class and thoroughly laughed at by all. Having the same people around you your entire life has its advantages and its disadvantages. One advantage is that people know your weaknesses. One disadvantage is that people know your weaknesses. I wouldn’t have changed the first eighteen years of my life for anything. Sure, it got annoying having everyone know your entire life story, but at the same time, they only know your entire life story because they lived your entire life right alongside you. They know you. You don’t have to try and explain why you do and don’t like certain things because they can probably remember the events that took place in your life that formed those preferences. If you grew up in a small town, going home is like going back to the nest. I can’t go downtown without seeing at least ten people I know. I love it. It’s part of who I am.

Moving to L.A. was a fresh start. But that’s not even the fresh start I’m talking about. My first six months in L.A. were rough. Not because anything traumatic happened to me, just because I was trying to live life on my own. I thought I was an independent person and that I could survive life and do things my way, and I was excited to finally escape my tiny town and have the chance to do this. It turns out the old adage is true. No man is an island; God made us to live in community. I recently moved into a house with eleven other girls and I cannot even begin to explain how blessed I am to be here. Although I’ve been living in L.A. for six months already, I feel that this is finally the fresh start I’ve been waiting for. This fresh start isn’t about me. It’s not about “finding myself” or making a name for myself or somehow changing my reputation or the way people perceive me. This fresh start is about getting to meet new people everyday and living in community. This fresh start is about other people. In the past week and a half, I have met more people than in my entire first semester in L.A. I can’t even tell you how much I love everyone in my new community. It’s amazing. God is really moving here at USC and all over L.A. and I there are no words to describe how excited I am to be a part of it.

I asked God for a group of Christian friends and he BLEW MY MIND. We dream and God says “dream bigger.” I love that. I’m not promoting some kind of health and wealth doctrine. I’m saying that if you ask God to put you in community, He will. I used to feel like I lived alone and that no one could really meet me at my level. I now feel like I live with and for others and the love between these people that I’m meeting is insane.

God is good. He works in unexpected ways. I moved from Beverly Hills to South Central and I couldn’t be happier.

The only way you can truly experience a “fresh start” is by asking him to give you one. For me, that meant a whole new life.