For those who want to be new...

I’ve felt very far from God lately. Very far from everything. I’m in a strange place where nothing makes sense, like another world completely separate from my own. Nothing is finished. Nothing is familiar. Nothing is old.
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I realized that I’ve often put God on hold these days, just like everything else, because I’m waiting for things to make sense again, putting everything off until life starts  and I can focus. Where am I? I don’t know this place, this house, these people. Everything is new.
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I find myself coming to the end of what I knew was My year. A year filled with change and growth and crazy adventures with the Lord. It’s been marked by intense joy and heartbreak, and it followed a year filled with the same. I had expected something to be complete by the end of this year. But now here I am, Christmas day, and I don’t feel like I’m at the end of anything. I feel, rather, like I’m in-between things, with nothing but time to discover this new life that has somehow unfolded around me.
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A little over two years ago I had my life figured out, a plan and a dream and someone to share it with. I had two lives: one at APU, new and exciting and terrifying, and my comfortable life in Elko to fall back on: friends, family, boyfriend, job. Home. And then everything started changing.
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Exactly two years ago I was in Elko, helping my mom with Christmas dinner, and I stopped and turned to her with tears in my eyes: “It’s Christmas, mom. It’s Christmas and he’s still not here.” Suddenly home was filled with pain, a place marked with memories like fingerprints on a dirty glass, no space left without a painful memory. My mind reflected that glass, the fingerprints covering my thoughts. Everything was old.
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Over the next year I felt God cutting my ties to Elko, wiping clean those fingerprints that covered my life, and I thought it was so I could branch out more, maybe stay in California after I graduated. And then I met the 9 most wonderful people I could imagine and went to India for a month, and I felt God taking the broken pieces of my life and sewing them together. God healed me, and I felt so new, like a child. And as I was gone, my dad transferred to a new job in Arizona to start a brand new life for our family.
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These past few months I felt rocked, broken, challenged. Those things God spoke to me through my team at APU and abroad were reinforced, dramatically, and I felt myself more humbled than ever. I felt heartbreak, that old familiar feeling, but it was not for myself this time. It was the most overwhelming few months of my life. And then I packed up all my things, left LA, moved most of my stuff into a new apartment at APU, and brought the rest to a brand new town and a strange home where my parents now live.
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In all this moving and changing, I hadn’t realized just how much was different until I came here to Kingman. I think it’s just now settling in... I’m not going back to Elko. I’m not going back home. I’m thankful that God cut so many ties there now, thankful that this isn’t as painful as it could be. But it’s my mind that has to cut it’s ties now.
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For those of you who know me, especially my friends from college, it’s clear how dearly I hold home in my heart while I’m away. I define myself partly by where I come from; Nevada is in my blood, it’s my culture, my heritage. The desert raised me, taught me how to be human and how to be quiet. Elko is where I grew up, became a woman, met Jesus.
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But all of the most dramatic transformation in my life has come from out of my element. My first semester of college with no friends in a new place... A semester in the mountains of Yosemite... A journey to the other side of the world with new friends... Los Angeles, almost more foreign to me than India was. These are the places God broke my heart to make room for more of Him. These are the places I discovered what I was made to be.
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And so now I am in Kingman and I am in a period of rest... nothing mind-blowing is happening at the moment, and so I step back and look around me to realize that this place is not familiar, and it is not temporary either. There is no lifeline home anymore. Everything is new.
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And I’m scared. Sometimes, in moments of realization like this one, I’m afraid of where this journey is going to take me, and if I’ll be prepared when I get there, with nothing old and familiar to fall back on. I’m afraid that I’ll end up somewhere and be only a mix of different parts incapable of doing anything for God’s Kingdom. My crutches are all of the sudden gone, my lifelines broken, my regrets unimportant, my mistakes behind me, and my past... past.
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And so there’s only one constant to fall on, the One who’s brought me through this journey and to this crucial point in it. I find myself needing to be reassured, to hear that every ounce of this instability is in His hands, every possibility under His control. I’m going over the past year in my mind to remind myself of what He has done, and that it was real, and it was beautiful. And I’m starting to see this time in life with new eyes... everything is new.
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Instead of emptiness where there used to be something, there is something new. I haven’t simply lost my crutches; I’ve been given the strength to walk. I’ve lost old friends, yes... but new ones take their place. And I know that I am a different person in so many ways. But my mind hasn’t fully settled into the idea yet. I am in-between two people right now... I am shedding the old, saying goodbye, coming to terms... so that I can fully walk into the new, embrace it, believe it.
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It is faith that tells me God will finish what He has started in me. And then He’ll start something new, because He is always moving, always creating. I feel distant right now, but I know that He is not distant. I feel lost, but I really am not. I’m just taking in the scene before me, floating above it until it becomes more real, and praying for encouragement from those who have seen me bloom this year.

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Life, the big journey, is full of little journeys. Periods of growth and change, mountains and valleys, in-between periods and culmination points. It’s ok to be in those places. It’s ok to be in a different place in life than what you are used to, to shed the old and embrace the new, to have your heart broken or ripped out, and to accept the healing that comes only from our precious Lord. This is what life is about, all of it. All of the joy, all of the pain, all of the hard decisions and miraculous moments; life wouldn’t be the same without every little bit of it, big and small, easy and difficult. And it’s not our choice to opt of out it. Sure, we didn’t exactly sign on. But here we are, and it’s not going to change for us. All we can do is be thankful to have a God who knows what He is doing and who is fully good at the very center of His being. He won’t give us stones. He’ll never give us stones.