When I went to London, I went to London alone. Many nights were spent frustrated, crying, and feeling absolutely alone. I was never able to plug into a church, and 99% of the students at my program didn't know the Lord or knew a false idea of Him. It was in the loneliness that God met me and showed me more of Who He was, not Who everyone else was telling me He was. I was given the ability to adore His beauty and to see it in things I hadn't seen it in before. I was able to seek Him before humans because He was the only one to help me sometimes. And in the midst of all this I learned to love the sinner without trying to save them myself.
Now, in Tacoma, I've faced a different sort of loneliness. For a great deal of my summer most of my closest friends have been absent in one way or another. I've had to learn to seek the Lord before my friends, even now that my friends aren't several thousand miles away. And you know what it's done? It's forced me to trust my God.
I've had to learn to trust God and not my own understanding or others' understanding. I'm still learning to trust Him even when I don't have a job or a place set up for the fall. I've just barely begun to stop setting my eyes on myself and see that God has much bigger things going on around me.
School probably shows best what God is doing in me right now. I've never thought that I was a poet. In fact, I didn't really like poetry. That is, until last January when, by the grace of God, my professor taught me the basics and then told me that I was incredibly gifted and should pursue poetry. Through a strange series of events God stripped me of my own attempts at planning my school year. He kept me from choosing what I felt I could have done by my own power pretty easily. And then, in His own ways, He confirmed that I was to take more poetry classes. Scared to death, I enrolled in Intermediate Poetry in order to take the poetry capstone in the spring, making my entire PLU career focused on poetry.
I can't write poetry on my own. I can't be a poet without God directly working in me. It needs to be God. Where before school was my comfort zone, now God has made it someplace where I need to be completely dependent on Him. And it's exciting. I have my loved ones close to me again, but now I get to be blessed by them while trusting my God to sustain me. Praise God!
