I arrived in Nashville, Tennessee earlier this evening. No, I'm not in Japan yet. I'm still waiting on a work visa. Well, I'm still waiting on a job, then, once I have one of those I'll be waiting about 3 months for a visa. In the meantime, though, I'm going to look for work while I spend time with my family in good ole TN.
I will miss my home in southern California (homes, really, as I've been wandering from house to house the last two or three months). I'll miss my friends, as well. I've had the privilege of getting to know many wonderful, godly people over the last five years in CA. I've been blessed by friends pouring into my life, teaching me how to love God and walk with Christ. In recent months these friends have been a great source of support. One of my friends acknowledged, through that spirit of support, this sentiment:
"Oh my gosh, Robert, this truly is a trying time in your life."
My friend is right. This is a trying time. I think, though, with everything happening in rapid succession like it is, that I'm beyond the point of feeling tried. For a while I felt stretched, I felt nervous to the point of exhaustion. I was really starting to feel attacked. Now, though, it's a little different.
I want to begin this next part by saying that I love Tennessee. I love my families (biological and church) and my friends very much. That's why it was so difficult to think about coming back here a month ago. I am no closer now to getting to Japan now than I was last time I was here and asked for support. I have nothing to show to the people who have been praying for me. I have no progress to report. I don't have a job still and I'm starting to lose heart for the job I interviewed for last week. I care very much about the people here, and I don't want to be a source of disappointment for them. It is very difficult to see coming home to Fairview as anything other than a failure at this time in my life.
Like I said earlier though, things are not as dark as they may seem. I have what looks like naive hope or foolish optimism for the future. I always have. I blame my parents for teaching me that no matter what happens God will be there with me. I've never really been afraid for the future. For me it's always been the present, the here and now, where cowardice has shown its ugly head most frequently. Normally I get so caught up with how crummy my current circumstances look that I forget to look at it from the bigger perspective.
I flew through a storm cloud today in the plane ride. The thing about flying through clouds that I've always found interesting is that from the ground, and even from the air above them, or flying by next to one, clouds look so beautiful and peaceful. When you're inside a cloud, though, your visibility is almost nothing, I could barely see the tip of the wing of our plane; all I could see was a shroud of semi-transparent gray. It was not the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, nor was it the most peaceful, it was a storm cloud so we hit a lot of turbulence. I sleep a lot on planes, but for some reason I was awake from before we entered the storm until after we left the clouds on the other side. The point I'm trying to make by using the illustration of the clouds is this: Sometimes we enter periods of time in life that look like they're going to be breezy, peaceful, even, but once we get into the thick of it we realize that maybe things aren't quite as soft and fluffy as they looked earlier. What I realized, passing through that cloud, was that for me, it is easy to think about the other side. You know, the return of the fluffy perspective, when you can see the sun shining on the back of the cloud you just came through. In retrospect the gray of the inner cloud looks white, the turbulence makes shapes like faces and elephants. It's hard to see those things from the middle, though.
This is what I started thinking about today on the plane: How can I appreciate what God is doing with me while I pass through storm clouds? My working theory, birthed from being stretched to a point beyond any reasonable amount of elasticity for a human, is something I'm calling the clay theory. This is an old analogy, as old as the old testament (which is pretty stinking old). The idea is that I can be clay. Clay doesn't have a definitive shape. I've been thinking of being stretched, to this point, as akin to the way a rubber band is stretched. You pull on it, and you can make neat shapes like the Eiffel Tower, or mini slingshots, but when you quit stretching a rubber band, unless you've stretched itself too far and snap the thing, it returns to its original shape. That's the way I've been thinking about being stretched as a person, or more specifically as a follower of Christ, but I realized that maybe I'm not being stretched and pulled just to snap back to an older form. That's why clay is the proper analogy, or more specifically, since I've done very little work with clay, play dough. When you stretch out play dough, or change it's shape, it doesn't snap back. It continues to be what it is. It doesn't snap if you change it's shape too much, it just sort of retains a new shape.
If my spiritual life and my understanding of Christ were elastic, like a rubber band, I think I would have snapped in twain by now. I guess it is a good thing that we were already told to be like clay. I guess now it's just a matter of letting the potter do his thing.
So Pray for me.
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