This Morning

It’s 7 in the morning in Oregon, and 6AM in Alaska right now. Just about every time I look at the clock I calculate just this, and I wonder what people in my life are doing right then, so far away. Right now, probably most of them are sleeping. Right now, I live for when everyone starts to get up and post new thoughts and news bits online so I can “keep in touch”....I’ve still not sunk into what I’m doing here.

It struck me this morning, for it is no longer morning here, why I’m having such a hard time adjusting. At least, part of it.

Till now, perhaps I’ve been making up external reasons for my difficulties, but this morning I realized that part of it is because things didn’t go my way this year. And I’m still bucking against that. God, forgive me. Part of it maybe the place. But more of it is me.

I knew that I didn’t “know” what this year held for me and what God was going to do with me this year, and I certainly love to pay lip service to this fact, but I think that in my heart--which still struggles ever so much to be connected to my head--I had an “idea” where I was going and then God “surprised” me.

I’m behaving like a child, I think. I love the idea that God knows what He’s doing and that He wants to surprise me with things far beyond my wildest dreams, but when it comes to actually living this out and getting on a plane when I don’t want to and getting up in the morning to face a lot of people I don’t know and doing a job that I’m not very good at yet, it’s way harder than it would seem.

It’s the Butterfly Principle, once again. Simply put, the principle that ideas and convictions and beliefs can only truly become authentic in the lifestyle sense through experience. Ideas, convictions and beliefs start out as seed in the mind, if you will--“caterpillars”--but only become the “butterflies” in one’s life that they were meant to be through the process of metamorphosis that only experience affords.

It’s this very metamorphosis I think I’m undergoing at the moment. I know that God wants better for me than I even want for myself, but until I experience what it’s like over and over enough to the point where I can actually trust this idea with my heart and not just my head--even when boarding that dreaded airplane and facing those unknown others and frustratingly new and ambiguous job--this caterpillar of an idea will never fully fly.

I have to say that I find both the “caterpillar” and the “butterfly” stage of things the most pleasant. The Caterpillar is the naive idealist and the Butterfly is so sage, able to bask in the exhilaration of a process completed, knowing how much better and more beautiful life is after the cocoon. However, it’s that cocoon stage that I find so hard. I’m wrapped up, not able to move until I learn and until is properly time.

But, it’s no way to live to only remain in naive, intellectual idealism and forego the necessary mental and spiritual adolescent difficulty to arrive at where we’re meant to be. And I’ve been thinking, the world is never changed by those who choose only that which is easy. And though I cannot change the world in it’s entirety, I can at least change mine. And I will choose the hard thing, when it’s right. God forbid I take the easy road, just for the sake of ease.

And after all, I’m in Paris. It could be worse, right?