All manner of thing shall be well.

Why must it be that there are so many thoughts but so little skill to express them?

If one thing has defined my summer (other than heat, youth, fun, BR, etc.), it has been the swirling mass of thought processing that has been almost constant inside my head. Sure, my head is almost always like that, but there are times when I'm so occupied with the occupations (yeah, occupied...occupations...) of the outer world that I'm not so hyper-aware of what's happening inside my head. This summer it's like my thoughts have been screaming too loudly to ignore them any more.

Maybe it's because I have a lot to process. That's true. And when I have fewer people to hang out with, I suppose it allows me to talk to myself more. (College is just a barrage of people: who can introspect when surrounded by a couple hundred friends all the time?)

Am I alone in the way that I consistently stop, look, and evaluate my life?

I am holding half an acre / torn from the map of Michigan. / And folded in this scrap of paper / is the land I grew in.

What is it about the past that it walks with you? How and in what way do we allow ourselves to be defined by something that no longer exists? Or maybe never existed in reality? Is it a prison or a door to a path toward freedom if we could only unlock it? A secret garden of nostalgia or Pandora's Box?

Will I always wonder why I ended up here and how I got the way I am? Will I wish it had been different or will I be glad for every experience? Will I learn to let it go in wisdom and time or will I continue to draw wisdom from the past itself holding on and not forgetting? Or is there a middle way?

And what about the people? Can we pass on from them or will they always be a part of us and have a part of us in them? Is God restoring the years that the locusts have eaten in those lives?

Think of every town you've lived in / Every room you lay your head. / And what is it that you remember? / Do you carry every sadness with you, / Every hour your heart was broken, / Every night the fear and darkness / Lay down with you?

How are we so defined by our pasts? Or is it just some of us? I've been talking with a girl in my youth group whose past has been blown open and every ugly, frightening, hurtful part of it is running wild and free wreaking havoc on her life. Ultimately, the fact that it has come to light and she is dealing with it is the path to freedom. But right now it's only scaring the hell out of her and leading to self-destructive habits.

I'm thankful that my past is not such a monster. But at the same time, mine, too, can so often have a death-grip on my present life. I was talking to Jessie about this girl and she gave me wisdom as always:

"Do you think it would help if she realized that this is only a small portion of her life? A small blip in the huge picture of her existence. There is so much hope. Storms never last forever, you just have to have enough courage to continue to sail through them . . . . The devil likes us to think when we're in the troughs that this is what life is made out of. In a couple months your girl will be a new person, by the grace of God."

I told her thanks for the advice about that other girl, I'll take it for myself.

The ultimate reality is God's sovereignty and our relative ability or inability to trust Him with all of what defines us. Sure, everything would be easier if we knew why and what for but then where would be the need for dependence? And without the need for dependence, where would be the relationship - the one thing that makes it all beautiful in the end?

Life is a continual uplift of the eyes, upturn of the hands - a continual cry: "We do not know what to do, but our eyes are upon You." (2 Chron. 20:12) The past is behind us down the long lane covered by trees leading into obscurity, dark and still. My fluttering worries and panicky grasp for control in the dark can be transformed into an exhilarating release.

Of course T. S. Eliot has the beautiful words for everything. :) I read through The Four Quartets and my mind is blown because he asks the same things but with so much more breadth of understanding. "Time past and time future" and the still point that is the dance. For us on earth it's all hints and guesses - we don't know why or what for, but we are a part of the music after all, being led by the great conductor. Sometimes we need to just shut the thinking down for a while and remember dependence. The past is darkness and stillness.

"I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing."