I am a Different Person

Cardiogirl at http://www.cardiogirl.net has had me heading down memory lane these days. She did a meme recently about meeting famous people and I commented that I had the privelege of studying under Frederick Buechner while I was in college. It turns out CG's husband is a bit of a Buechner fan and so I tried to dig out my old syllabus and notebooks (of course, I still have them - I am a tremendous pack-rat, if you didn't know that already).

I ended up pulling out my college journals, as well, and have spent far too much time today walking down memory lane. What a curious thing it is to revisit our past through old journals. It brought all those old emotions and relationships right up to the foreground again. This is why I am a firm believer in journalling. I was such a different person then. I mean, I still see a lot of the core person, but life has rounded me out in such significant ways. Granted, I was a college student then. Typical life perspective from such a limited spere of existence. I had high ideals and intense spiritual yearnings. I sought hard after purity and genuine righteousness. But life hadn't really dealt all that many blows yet and I think my answers to life's questions were fairly trite, or at least, easily acquired.

Even now, I look at my life and realize that I haven't experienced much in the way of hardships when you hold my life up next to someone else's. I listened to a powerfully moving and convicting eulogy on You Tube tonight by a man named Rick Burgess, on behalf of his two year old son who drowned recently in their family pool. Then I look at the ideals and life goals I expressed as a young college student and I feel like I have not achieved what I sought to achieve. It was easy to have lofty dreams before life intervened with its roads less travelled and detours to the path I thought I was on.

I can remember talking with a professor in the last week of college and outlining what my plans were for the next five years. He commented that he wished he could see so clearly where the next five years would take him. He knew, didn't he, that there was no way in the world that my life was going to head off in the direction I planned for it, all nice and neat and tidy. He just couldn't explain that to me then. He couldn't communicate what only life experience can - that life often takes you in directions you never intended and brings along trials and opportunities you wouldn't have asked for. God's leading is mysterious and He works in ways that are so difficult to comprehend. He asks far more of us than we realize and He wants far more for us than we can grasp or attain on our own.

I wish I could be granted the opportunity to take Buechner's class again now. Perhaps I would get even more out of it than I did back then (and it was a phenomenal class - we read powerful literature and had deep conversations). In the summer following that class, I corresponded with a friend about Buechner and his books and his thoughts about the books that we had read. I discovered one of the letters this friend had sent me, tucked in my journal. He was trying to express the beauty of the way God reaches down to us and grants us grace in our weakest moments. Sadly, I hadn't had enough weak moments to truly know how weak I am. Reading his letter and realizing what I must have written to him made me aware of how different I am now.

It also made me aware of how different I wish I could be, even from the person I am now. I want to grow and become more than I am. I want deeper goals than I had back then. I want a richer experience of life and of God and of His purposes for my life. I want my faith to be founded on more than an autopilot mode. I want to read Buechner again and see his messages of the mystery of the way God works. I will have to write another post about this Buechner class because he taught us so much and the books we read were worth mentioning in more detail. For tonight, I had to reflect on my own journey and realize that God will never leave us standing still. He will take us into valleys and wildernesses and will make us a different person.