“And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn’t it?
It might be time for you to go. It might be time to change, to shine out.
I want to repeat one word for you:
Leave.
Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn’t it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don’t worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed.”
Donald Miller
At first I wanted to disagree with Donald Miller that when you come back everything will be the same because life is not a sedentary thing. Life is always and will always be changing with or without us. Then I thought about missionaries who leave for a space of time [sometimes it feels like an eternity but we all know that it's not]. It seems that the world they come back to is so completely different than the one they left and you wonder how life could ever feel the same for them again. But then I think about the missionaries I've been close with who leave and come back. They are different just as life is of course different, though the more they adjust and you talk with them the more you see flashes of how things once were--how the foundation of your dynamic [or even frame or the whole house] is still there, ready for rebuilding/repair; how beneath it all, they are still there just as you are still you.
Perhaps it is that everything changes, but there are qualities in everything that are so intrinsic that they remain no matter what happens. Maybe those are the flashes we see.
At first I wanted to disagree with Donald Miller that when you come back everything will be the same because life is not a sedentary thing. Life is always and will always be changing with or without us. Then I thought about missionaries who leave for a space of time [sometimes it feels like an eternity but we all know that it's not]. It seems that the world they come back to is so completely different than the one they left and you wonder how life could ever feel the same for them again. But then I think about the missionaries I've been close with who leave and come back. They are different just as life is of course different, though the more they adjust and you talk with them the more you see flashes of how things once were--how the foundation of your dynamic [or even frame or the whole house] is still there, ready for rebuilding/repair; how beneath it all, they are still there just as you are still you.
Perhaps it is that everything changes, but there are qualities in everything that are so intrinsic that they remain no matter what happens. Maybe those are the flashes we see.
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