Everyone laughed when I told them I listened to one album on repeat my whole drive from home to Tennessee a few weeks ago. That's a lot of hours, but it was a lot of healing, too. I sat my Bible on my dashboard and prayed my way through Philippians 3, Hebrews 12, and Isaiah 60. It wasn't until the past week, though, that one song from the album has ministered most:

It's the way we mend.
We tear it all down and we start it again.
I don't know how but you find me just where we began.
That's just the way we mend.

It's been like the game Jenga, I said to her the other day. There are pieces pulled out all over the place, I was toppling, but I just kept getting taller on a prayer and a praise report. It was life I was talking about, my life: filled with gaping holes, as contradictory as that sounds. Places where I've stuck my head in the proverbial sand, hoping that with enough positive confession they would disappear. But they don't. They haven't. And so I've toppled in the past few weeks. Tearing it all down and starting again. Finding He's found me where we began and that's the real way to mend.

Like the tower of Babel and its constructors I'm sure I've been convincing myself that higher is better, bigger too. But really, it's not; not if the foundation below isn't sure.

But how, she asked, do we accept the things that have caused holes in our lives and make them part of the foundation instead of the detriment of it? And that, my friend, I replied, is the mystery. We don't know. We know they'll be a testimony. We know that they'll be part of something bigger and better, but we don't know how they fit in the Jenga-like game of life. We just know that a certain foundation is better than a sky-scraper Spirituality, so we take out the tools and get to work.

He Who began a good work in you is faithful to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus. Philippians 1.6

I know I've been silent around these parts. I've been silent in a lot of parts. She told me the other day that it was good to have me back. I've been back for a few weeks, I said, staring at her with a creased brow. No. I mean, it's good to have the old you back. You were different last semester and even when you came back this semester. It's good to have the real you, the joyful you, the loving you, back.

Oh. I nodded. Thanks.

See, can I be honest? And really truthful? It's redemptive, I promise, but it takes a while to tell:

I cried as I left a brick house in Potsdam, New York on January third of this year. I watched the sunrise to my left and listened to Nickel Creek sing about angels and their wings, and I left home. It was the hardest thing I've done in a long time. It hurt. I was heading back down here, the land of my current living, taking a brief hiatus in Philadelphia, the land of my roots.

To every inquisition about my plans after graduation this summer my answer was the same: I don't know, but I want to come home. I was hardened and sullen about anything else. I was disappointed in so many, many things and disillusioned with the promises I thought I'd been given and of which I'd been cheated. Home was safe because it's where I felt covered, loved, and necessary.

A few weeks ago I began the realization that I wrote about earlier: disappointment must be recognized before it can be testimonialized. And I began to work at this stuff with an aggression I haven't had in a long time. Forcing myself to sit still and cry for hours if necessary and confess things to the Lord that I had allowed to build up in the name of consistent optimism. And He was faithful. So faithful.

Two weeks ago contentment was the issue at hand. I began to pray for it. Determined to not spend the rest of my time down here wishing to be there, wishing the days, hours, minutes, to pass quickly, thinking of families and babies and church twenty hours north. Determined not to waste this last season of my time here.

Saturday night I was driving home from Chattanooga, it was dark and I didn't know if she could see the moisture on my cheeks, so I felt like an explanation was due. "Have you ever felt emotion tangibly? Have you ever felt a prayer for answered?" Because I was feeling it. I heard Him say "You have asked and so you have received. Contentment is your portion" and I felt it rise in me.

I was reading the eulogy written by Jim Wallis for his father and one line in it stuck with me, "You know there's something different about a person who everyone thinks of as their best friend." And I guess the truth is, like I said, home is safe to me because there I know I am loved and needed and everyone's friend. But suddenly this week alone seven people have expressed how much they love me, how much I'm the best friend they've ever had and (beside an obvious desire for people to know that I'm just a puzzle piece of an interlocking body of believers who all love as unconditionally as I try to) I was so humbled.

Not because I'm loved here. No. That's a temporary placebo. That's how words sway and tempt up to think our worth is in our ability to keep a string of admirers around us. I was humbled because I was beginning to realize what God was trying to show me.

Tuesday night we were in intimate worship and my face was buried in the carpet of the Goodwin Building I listened to the words, "I want You, I need You, You're the only thing I desire, You are enough", and as sacreligious as it might seem, I tried to be the one singing them to Him, but really all I heard was Him singing them to me. That I'm His best friend. And the Bible says that "the nearness of God is my good." And suddenly He was near. And I knew it would be good.

The other night I had a phone interview from Florida, and another one is scheduled on Monday from Washington state; the stack of internships and other options aren't so scary now. And the idea that maybe the next portion of my life won't be in Potsdam isn't so overwhelming. Because I learned something recently. I learned this:

Wherever I go, providing I keep Christ the center of my life and love and speak the truth always, people will feel loved by Jesus in me. There will always be people who think of me as their best friend, even if the list of people I name as such is short and very, very sweet. Jesus loves me, He even likes me, likes to be with me so much that He likes to be near to me--and that is my good. That is my home.

Wherever it is.

Still reading? Okay, you can stop, because this is the end of the beginning again.

It's the side of campus that houses the tennis court, the male freshman dorm, and The Beech Building. Needless to say, it's the side of campus with which I haven't familiarized myself these past two years. Suffice it to say I've never entered any of the three edifices on the northern end of Lee University. Until now.

The job description was fairly harmless:

Looking to hire upperclassman English or Writing Major with experience in editing, publishing, and layout design. Federal Work Study Approved and flexible hours. Must be familiar with computers. Apply in person.

This fits just about any of the English majors on campus, but for some reason several of my professors thought it fit me best. I was recommended and hired for the job last week. I set my jaw and walked toward the building that was my nemesis on name alone--see, it's not just The Beech Building, it's the science building.

I spend hours of my days in the Beech Building basement, housed in a ten by twelve office cluttered with the marks of a PhD in life and its sciences. He's fairly disorganized, aged, balding, and the sweetest boring old man. And I've been hired to quote - save his life - end quote. He tells me so several times a day, usually after I've explained the same aspect about publishing for the fifth time that afternoon.

It's been fun, thus far. I'm learning loads about science and blood cells and the brain and evolutionary theories. I sit in the desk, in front of the computer and he sits across from me in the hard-backed chairs against the wall: reverse psychology it feels like.

Who would have thunk? All I know is that I'm thankful for a job this semester. A job I like. A job in which I'm learning. A job that takes me to places I've never been before.

Even if it is just a small office in the basement of my nemesis.

I'm being purged of some sins I wasn't aware existed. I'm being delivered from the sin of optimism. Yeah. Optimism. That worldly method of falsely accusing pain and disappointment with a chin-up attitude and a can-do spirit. I'm strong. I'm able. I'm bigger than all of this.

I'm broken.

And now, all of these things, secreted hopes, wishes, plans, desires and goals, things which have been thwarted in my life because of circumstances and seasons, are taunting me in many forms. I am undone. Because I thought that all I had to do was be expectant. I thought that being sad was a sin. I thought that to admit that I was disappointed meant that I was disappointed in God. I thought that giving was better if given with no thought for the sacrifice involved.

A friend and I sat in Starbucks today and I read this verse to her:

I now rejoice, not that you were made sorrowful, but that you were made sorrowful to the point of repentance; for you were made sorrowful according to the will of God, so that you might not suffer loss in anything through us. For the sorrow that is according to the will of God produces a repentance without regret, leading to salvation, but the sorrow of the world produces death. For behold what earnestness this very thing, this godly sorrow, has produced in you: what vindication, what longing, what zeal, what avenging of wrong! II Corinthians 7.9-11

A sorrow that leads to repentance or a sorrow that leads to death. I want the former. And if the path to repentance is a godly sorrow, a place of disappointment, in circumstances, in people, in situations beyond my control, if that is the place God takes me, so be it. I'll go. I'll go into that valley, because valleys are the places that fill first when the rains do come. I'll go into the valley, because there I am confronted with the maker of the mountains I can't climb myself. I'll go into the valley because it is there I am able to be a part of a testimony.

God isn't glorified on the plains, on the plateaus—He's glorified when we have walked in the valley of the shadow of death and known that He is with us.

He is with me. In my disappointments. In my sorrow. In the dark wrestling of my soul and in the restoration of it. In my weakness. In my failure. I haven't arrived, but I lift my eyes and behold the Maker of mountains and valleys, and trust that He knows the way through them all.

Okay. This is funny. I mean, really. You wonder what we're really like, underneath the faces we put on in public--this is it. No kidding.

I love these kids.

Tomorrow morning I'm leaving. My car is mostly packed, somehow more full than when I arrived, though I planned on having less. I'm not sure how that works exactly.

Last night I curled next to her, more for companionship than warmth, and she prayed a blessing over me. An absence of fear. A spirit set on the things of God. A heart that is resolute and certain, and overall, in the face of uncertainty and irresolution, peaceful. I'm not going to lie, the confession that leaving here means entering there makes me feel a little scared. Here is home, here is where I belong, here is where I am most confronted with the Lord and with His work in my life. Here is where I am safe.

That said, there is where I am not so safe, save for the Hand of God on my life. It is where I am forced to grow by myself and push myself and remember that the world is watching how I respond to the call. There is where I am not in a fishbowl, swimming in safe and certain circles.

But the more I swim here, the more I find fish of a greater quality swimming beside me. It makes the fishbowl, however seemingly constrained to the world, one of quality and destiny. I felt that last night, standing in worship surrounded by the leadership of our church. I felt that listening to the prophetic words given over these men and their families. I felt that when my heart felt light with purpose and heavy with responsibility as I left that room. It's a collective journey, he said, a collective arrow.

And I'm more than honored to be a part of it. And a little scared to leave its quiver once again.

But arrows were made to fly and I purpose to fly straight and true, sent from the hand of One Who knows and sees better than I.