The Ordinary Ones

This winding, wandering road. It’s a beautifully crooked one that I thought I began to walk down one day in a moment of lostness, or because of the fickleness of my own heart. Now I wonder if it is a road that I have been on all along and just never noticed or had the eyes to see. The Lord who made this fickle heart, He is not a God who is angry at my wandering, feet, my feet that are muddy from the distracted playing under trees and in fields on the side of the road.  Instead, He rejoices as He walks with me down my wandering way.  He stops to play with me in a field of dandelions. His feet are muddy too. He lays down by the deserted highway to watch the stars come out on a cloudless night, so I don’t have to wonder alone at their majesty. He is not standing at the end of the road waiting to chastise me when I reach Him. He has been with me all along and He has expected my meandering. He is not surprised by it because He made my little restless heart and rejoices in my seeking,

For the past few years, I have been trying desperately to find the Lord in ordinary moments and ordinary places. After moving back to America from Haiti a couple years ago, I became convicted that I was missing something if I couldn’t find Jesus in these small and regular moments, and set out on a journey to find Him there. To be very real with you, I feel like I have largely failed. I have felt a very constant ache and thirst for the Lord. I feel like I am constantly missing Him. I feel like I need to do and to be more. But those could really be just feelings. At the same time, I know that He is here in the midst of my life. I can find Him in my heart when I pray. I can find him in my desperate prayers for patience while I am teaching. I can find Him when I am speaking with a student who is difficult but needs some love. I can find Him in worship or in the rosary while I am stuck in traffic. I can find Him in the community of teachers at my school and my grad school who are amazi

There is a very important cardboard box in the back of my closet that I pull out from time to time to help me remember. Almost a year ago I came home from an interview with a wonderful mission organization that I deeply admired. The interview went well and I was in the interview process with another organization that I also had a missionary-crush on. Living a deeply missionary life has been my dream for a while now, and it still is a something that I hold very dear and ache for each day. But that day I came home from this interview with a need to map out a vision, large so that I could see it, touch it. There is a verse in the book of Habbakuk that has moved me since college. “Then the Lord answered me and said: Write down the vision; Make it plain upon tablets, so that the one who reads it may run. For the vision is a witness for the appointed time, a testimony to the end; it will not disappoint. If it delays, wait for it, it will surely come, it will not be late.” Ha