I spent a few hours cleaning out my filing cabinets. My filing cabinets were so full that I couldn’t fit anything else in them. So I cleaned them out… I sorted thru so many papers that had to do with my past life.
It seems I used to live in a different world- one full of politics, study and talk of international relations and development, names getting thrown around, scholarly journals, and lots of touristy places, filled with events and places to go and things to do.
I live in a different world. I have been to the places that used to be just theory, and the theory we learned in college, is null and void once you are required to act and love the people who are so desperately poor.
I live in a different world, one of autism, where the politics of education are also null and void. I can’t even try to think if what I am doing to try to get my protege to not run around the classroom is politically correct.
I live in a different world, where no one cares where you’ve been or what you’ve done or who you know. I live in a normal town, a normal life, can’t get any more normal than this. I put aside the exoticness of the Amazon and the prestige of dining with senators to sit in the dirt in the favelas in Brasil, and to sit in the dirt in Africa.
I live in a different world, one full of love and hope. I was so broken, needy, unlovable, desperate, clingy, in college. I can’t even relate to that girl. I have lived so long without a boyfriend for so long, now it is a shock to my system to have a man who cares about me in my life again. I am not clinging onto him, I am simply being friends with him, very good friends, I want him to be my best friend. I want it to be natural, not driven by the old me, the clingy, obsessive me.
Jesus has given me balance. He has freed me, released me from my past life, from my past chains. He released me from my need to do, do, do, and go, go, go. He slowed me down through a preschooler with cerebral palsy, and he let me rest when I thought I was going to Brasil to DO things for him. I love who God is creating me to be, and I love it that I am not finished yet.
If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation, the old has gone, the new has come. For me, that could not be more true. I am not at all who I was. It is no longer a prophetic thing, or a simple wish, it is the reality I am living in right now. I live in a different world. I am a new person.
