I was in a weird place during the summer of 2013. I didn’t “find myself” then, but I was certainly changing; becoming more bolder, more daring, and arguably more lonely and out-of-place.
I had no shortage of friends to hang around when the mood struck me, but I was finding it harder to connect with them. In a lot of ways, it seemed like the “sweet spots” of my relationships were growing bitter, and I was the only one who noticed. So when I started my junior year of college that fall, I became more active in my attempts to branch out. I joined groups, tried talking to different people, and even registered for a study abroad program for the following semester. Looking back on that time, it’s obvious that I was just taking shots in the dark, and praying that I hit something good.
I left for Prague on January 13th, 2014. I was doing it all by myself, with no traveling companions, and no friends in the program. Two years later, it still stands as the most terrifying thing that I’ve ever done, but it taught me that when you want something bad enough, you’ll get over all of the nerves and anxieties that conspire to keep you where you are. Eventually, you’ll stop asking questions that you don’t have the answers to, and you’ll jump.
Last Friday night, I was sitting at a table in a friend’s apartment. We were laughing and having a good time when all of a sudden I heard a voice that wasn’t audible, but resonated so deeply that it might as well have been:
“Look at what I’ve done.”
As I get older, I’m realizing that God will speak to you wherever you are, and you better be ready to hear what He has to say. And even with the loud talking, and unedited rap music blaring in the background, I was able to hear something that I wasn’t expecting, but definitely needed to hear.
Sitting there, with a group of people that I never would have met had I not had the courage to get on that plane to Prague, I thought about something that another friend said about God filling spaces in creative ways. These friends that I was sitting around the table with all attended the same university as I did, but given the rigid lines between certain colleges at NC State, we never met. They were “around” when I was frustrated and fed up during the summer of 2013, but instead of having our paths cross at that time, God saw fit to bring us all to a foreign country in order to meet. We got to know each other under circumstances that forced us to become as close as we did, and that’s something that I don’t think could have happened in Raleigh. If that isn’t a high form of creativity, then I don’t know what is.
As I write this, I’m beginning to feel the same sense of unease that I first felt in 2013. Granted, it’s way more complicated now since I’m done with school, but it’s still familiar enough for me to be able to identify it. In a lot of ways, I feel like I’m standing on a diving board, wondering how to jump, where I should aim for, and most importantly, what will happen when I hit the water. There are countless unanswered questions, but as I stand up here, I think back to 2013, and how those frustrations were handled in a way that I never could have come up with myself. That remembrance helps me realize that all of my current situations will be handled with the same creativity that I still can’t wrap my head around, and that realization leaves me free to do the only thing that I can do right now-it leaves me free to jump.
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