In Transit.

I think that the word “change” should be renamed into a more complex word. One with maybe 15+ letters. Then the clichéd word will be not-so-cliché anymore, and it will really capture the extent of which the word goes, and all that ensues. After a good 19 (almost 20) years of my life, I think I’ve finally met the word, after hearing about and catching brief glimpses of it for so long: its constancy, the pains and groans it causes, yet the joys and blessings it produces.

I remember throughout this entire past year at NU, I’ve hated – no, detested – everything that the word embodies. I fell back, naturally, on everything that defined me: Texas. And everything in it: friendships, comfort, environment, weather, childhood, culture. And what a comfortable fall it was, like I was flopping backwards onto a feathered bed with rose pedals. Like the ones you see in Mattress commercials.

But this summer I was betrayed. Betrayed by the thing I held dearest. Home betrayed me. How dare it change while I was gone! Without my permission, too. My room wasn’t the way I left it. Pictures were torn down, my brother’s workout bench right smack in the middle of where I kept my beaver rug. Before I knew it, I could no longer walk a few steps to Jason’s room to enjoy him rolling his eyes at me as I told him absurd and ridiculous things. I could no longer walk out and see my dad cleaning. I came back to home, but it didn’t feel like home. I’ve been only holding on to a memory. Five members of the family, each spread out in five different cities. Me, out of the only place I’ve ever felt so free in and into some cold, bi-polar, strange, big city, where they don’t have honkeytonks or southern hospitality.

Sure, I was expecting change. Friends change, seasons change, majors change. But I think that when something so rooted, constant, and dear is subject to change, that’s when it becomes a different word. When something so close to your heart that it seems like it’s what keeps your heart beating – when home changes, that’s the type of change that makes everything else seem like just a rattle or bump.

Change is so powerful. It makes you feel so small. And there’s only one other moment I can remember that has made me feel so small and insignificant, and that is when I’m face-to-face with earth. With God’s creation. Like laying under a sky of stars so numerous and beautiful that I don’t even know where to set my eyes, or standing waste-deep, sand between my toes, feeling the small waves almost knock me over, or when I witness a storm or a view so beautiful, so powerful, that it rids any athiest of any doubt of there being something greater or more powerful than human nature, knowledge, or intellect.

And so I think I got it. Change is so necessary. Like communication, or breathing, or presence is so necessary. I think Change is something God created to put man in his place. It is just like nature – uncontrollable and unpredictable. That our lives are to God like a blink of an eye. We are nothing. Without change, there will be no such thing as constancy. Like in The Count of Monte Cristo, true happiness can not exist without true desparation. Thus the very nature of God can not exist without the very nature of change. He never ceases to amaze me. Never ceases to strip away the things I fall back on so that I’ll replace it with Him. Over, and over, and over again.

I think this is why in the past 3 years since I’ve created this blog, I’ve only had 5 posts. I’ve always been reluctant to start a new one, no matter how many thoughts or ideas were teeming in my mind. Because with each new post or entry I make, it pushes the older ones down. It is proof that time really is ticking, that change really is happening.

So I’m learning how to handle it. God’s teaching me how to embrace it. And still learning the grooves, the dusty crevaces, the sharp turns around corners, the smooth surfaces and sharp edges of transition. Sometimes I like it, when it alters my way of thinking, of switching my priorities, of putting the important over the urgent. When I find so much joy in the simplest things. But often it feels like Hell. Cause I want to hold on. But that’s so selfish. The biggest danger on this earth is to think that everything is about you. What and who are we if our friends are not around to bring out the best or the worst in us, if we aren’t in a familiar setting surrounded by familiar faces, if our knowledge or looks or talents don’t mean a thing? What will we look like when we’re naked, stripped of everything we’ve gained or learned on this earth, and only left with our own hearts and conscience?


I’m trying, God. I’m trying to find my joy and my hope in You. To not let my moods or my happiness or my satisfaction be determined by my ever-fluctuating relationships, by my disappointments and unmet expectations, by human love, or by my image to others. I want to fall in love with You.





And of course, can't have a post without images. I'll limit it to one this time. :)


Better when we're together..