The Other Side and Thoughts on the Idea of Justice

This morning, on my run, I was thinking about how many times in my life while going through a rough time I would wonder to myself if I was just being “ungrateful” for having a hard time with given circumstances and later I would look back on that season and just think in retrospect how good I had it and regret not appreciating such a “rough patch” for what what it really was.

Not sure if that is even articulated clearly, but I also realized once more this morning that every difficult season of my life that I can look back on I don’t regret going through, but I am most decidedly glad it’s over.

I’m sitting on the other side of a lot right now. I’m “happier” now than I have been in about 2 1/2-3 years. Praise God. I’ve come out healthy and wiser on the other side of an emotional roller coaster involving a few people, a foreign country (read: culture), and a seemingly eternal spell of no direction, and I am able to breathe deeper and begin to see what God has done and is still doing in me through all of that.

But, I’d never want to go back and do it again. Some moments, I realize, I made the right choice just barely. And some situations, I can see now, I got out of or through by the skin of my teeth. And only because I was tearfully on my face for a lot of it.

But He is good. Not safe, as I’m so often reminded, but good. It’s also nice to be able to look back on some of these vaguely described difficulties and know that they were legitimately difficult and that I still do not wish that could go back and “appreciate how good I had it”. I am so, so grateful to have gone through it all--but am equally grateful to be done.

Funny that such a past musing would resurface this morning on my run. Also kinda funny to have some of my past validated by a more objective and happy me now. Makes me chuckle a bit.

On a completely different note, I’m still loving my job. I knew that when God would give me a job and/or direction, it would be a veritable catapult and I wouldn’t know what hit me.

That said, I’ve long suspected that I have some sort of intellectual leaning for the law. This new job has confirmed it for me. I have found a thing that clicks.  This is the way my mind works.

I come home now a very different tired than before. Before, it was because I was on my feet all day and dealing with people--now it’s because I don’t stop learning all day, all week long. I haven’t gotten bored yet and I love that! He knows me. :)

I’ve been thinking a lot about why this is that the field of “law” resonates with me so. For all of this time and through college I’ve also felt this way about languages. Words, mother tongue or foreign--they fascinate me. At first glance the two subject matters don’t seem to relate at all. But I’ve come to realize that they do indeed. It’s kinda cool.

One of the things that I have always loved about language is that it’s very black and white in one sense--but so grey in another. You learn a set of rules, grammar, vocabulary, and all of the et cetera framework that it takes to execute the language effectively. However, all of these things are just tools to accomplish something far more grey, and that is communication.

Communication involves so much more than just the words that are said. And those who are the best at it understand this. It involves countless other nuances, including understanding your audience, body language, cultural savvy, timing...and the list goes on.

I’ve come to realize that law is to justice what language is to communication. The law is in black and white--most literally--but justice involves so much more and is inevitably situational. I love it.

I smile to myself when I think about this. Funny how two seemingly unrelated things could turn out to have so much in common, huh?

Cool.