Of trees, winter, and this crazy thing I call "life"

Hello, everyone!

As you can tell… I took a little time off from blogging. I’ll get back into a deep thought next time, but I wanted to update you all as to my where- and what-abouts. As usual, everything about me is subject to change!

First off, I’m back in Oregon again. I know people always want to offer you some sort of convoluted congratulations on a new chapter of life, but let’s face it—life never fits neatly into chapters, or verses, or iambic pentameter for that matter. I’m unemployed, which is kind of nice but mostly just sort of humiliating. Thankfully, though, I’m staying with my parents while I look for work. I don’t think I’ll ever really seal off the “chapter” in Mexico—my love for that place and those people runs far too deep. It would bleed through the very pages of my life were I to be so foolish as to even attempt to deem it “over.” I will say that in the foreseeable future, though, I may not be south of the border for a while. It’s hard, as usual, to think that both of my lives have to be so separated by geography. Why my friends in Mexico can’t just stop by for dinner never ceases to baffle me. There are afternoons where I think, “I’ll just drop by and say hello to…  oh wait… I can’t.” That’s normal. I still wake up sometimes and wonder where I am.

All I can really say at present is that God has a plan for me in the midst of this chaotic thing I call life. And I wouldn’t trade my messy, fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants existence for anything. Obviously, I’m not in the middle of one of the fun parts of the story. I literally had to take soda cans in the other day just to pay for a cup of coffee! I may need to donate plasma here pretty soon. It’s almost funny, but then there’s this sudden feeling deep within and I realize that nothing will ever be the same. I don’t know how all of the pieces of what makes me Alyssa will fit together. I love Latin America, but it’s not time for me to go gallivanting off on another adventure just yet. I miss playing music with my band in Mexico, but I just… can’t. I can’t pick up my guitar and run down the street to band practice. Band practice is taking place many, many miles away from my parents’ house in Eugene, Oregon. And that’s a simple fact of life. I continue to pray for God to make a way for me to keep ministering through the gift of music and worship, but I really find myself in a season of waiting.

Waiting.

The very letters are bitter inside of my mouth.

Waiting to hear back from how many hundreds of job applications?

Waiting as I plug in with my new church body here in Eugene—friendships

always take time.

           

Waiting to start earning money so I can pay off what I owe to the Bank of Mom….

Waiting… waiting….

                        WAITING!

            It is unfathomably frustrating, to say the least. To go from “missionary” to “couch potato/job hunter” is a bit, well, overwhelming. I know, I know—I’m not actually any kind of failure here (I’ll always be a missionary), but the emotions are there. If you’ve never been here, then just wait. You will be eventually.

This is the kind of season where there are no words of wisdom, there are no magical little mantras, and no amount of “friendly advice” will ever cut it. All you can do is hold on to Jesus for dear life. Because there are times when all I want to do is yell something along the lines of “What the heck are you up to?!” and maybe a few other things that a girl raised in church wouldn’t put on her blog. Let’s face it: only God can get me through this. Only God knows where the other side of this equation is.

You know what this reminds me of? Trees. Work with me here. As I was walking the dog this morning (see? I’m not a total couch potato…) I saw a tree with the first tiny glimmers of fall peaking through its leaves. And the thought struck me: is the tree waiting for fall to start? What about winter? Does a tree spend the winter waiting for spring? What do trees do with the cataclysmic changes that affect them four times a year?

Biologically speaking, very little. The roots of the trees remain more or less the same. Water is still sucked up through the complex network of tubes that weave, snakelike, throughout the tree. Nutrients are still collected and distributed, used and expelled by the tree’s various cells. Only when the tree is long dead and we look at the rings on the inside of a tree’s trunk do we have any idea that something truly changed within. Yet, silly idiots that we are, we point at a tree in winter and declare that it’s “dead.”

I think life follows very much the same pattern. We so want to see big changes on the outside—bright emerald leave erupting into flames of red and then falling rather dramatically to their doom. But the idea of remaining constant, of having roots that run deeper than what we see at first… why, it sounds almost boring! Our highlight-oriented society feeds on the big moments. But what about the winters we spend with so little visible change that anyone might suggest we’d died, or lost our minds?  We are almost blind to the day-by-day existence that ultimately transforms our lives. Did you know that if a tree never passed through winter, the cork inside of its trunk would have no structural support? That the hard, thin rings from wintertime end up being the point of strength in a tree? The spongy, everything’s-great-thanks cork that grows in the rest of the year cannot long support the weight of an adult tree. Like trees, we need these seasons of winter. The hard, scraggly rings that it forms are simply irreplaceable.

Obviously, I am not advocating that anyone get out a chainsaw and cut me open to count the rings (there would be 22, you idiots). Nor am I attempting the lunacy of saying that these seasons are great fun or that I’m having the time of my life. All I’m saying is that, sometimes, you just hold on to God and wait for him to bring you to the other side. Can I explain and pontificate to you the intricate theology of why the heck God put it in my heart to leave the beach in Mexico to come job hunting in a terrible economy? Um, yeah… no. I cannot begin to fathom what God is up to. But let me make you a promise: When all is said and done, when all of the winters have passed and I finally stand before God, and He and I get to sit down and look a the “rings” that make up my life… I won’t stand aghast at His cruelty. Nor will I weep because somehow I lost God’s Will for my life and became some sort of runner-up to following Jesus.

Oh no.

Rather, I think that God will guide my hand along the many rings that make up who I grow to be. And in the midst of the dizzying complexity of all that I see, the intricate pattern that follows the highs and lows of my life, the beauty of what God worked together for my good… I shall simply fall before Him in worship and give thanks for everything.

At least, that’s the God I call "King."

*    *    *

So, I have no great highlights to report to you all, my dear readers. I am rather sorry and feel kind of awkward even typing at all. But I can report to you from the midst of where I am that God is good, and He is faithful. And that my best times are yet to come.

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

Jeremiah 29:11

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