The Beauty Right Behind Me

This weekend we were blessed with weather that hardly ever happens. I mean, it was amazing. And tonight I got the pleasure of sitting on the second level of my back deck and watching the sun set over the huge hills in my subdivision. I truly believe that one of the most amazing things God does is paint the sunsets. He paints them so that we can sit and watch them, and remember how beautiful He is. He paints them so that when life is an unattractive struggle we still have something that takes our breath away that happens every single day.

The last three mornings I have woken up in a bed different than my own with a heavy heart. I'm pretty sure that even if I had woken up in my own bed my heart would have been heavy, but there is significance in the fact that I have been waking up in different places. You see, I'm running. And even though I recognize the fact that I'm running, I have no idea how to stop. I'm not even sure that I want to. When I get in my car to drive away from my life, and God asks me what I'm doing, I just turn the radio up louder. I'm running from the life that God has fashioned for me, because I'm convinced that I know what's best. And man am I wrong.

Change has never been something I was very good at embracing. The idea of letting go of the life I have lived for the last few years breaks my heart, because I'm convinced that life couldn't get any better than it was. God told me to move here, and He went before me and prepared this place. I have amazing roommates (even though they are walking natural disasters, they have great hearts), and I have friends that live within five minutes of me that I really do have a great time with. But I've turned my back to them and shut them out. I go out of my way to avoid having conversations with them, and it makes me nervous when I can't avoid them in situations like church. Unfortunately (or maybe, fortunately) at least one of them is very in tune with what God wants to say through her, and she cornered me in church this morning and told me that what I was doing wasn't ok. I was honest with her and told her that I didn't know what else to say other than that I was doing it on purpose, and I didn't really want to stop. She hugged me and told me that she would be patient with me, but that they weren't going to try anymore if I wasn't going to try, too. She proved it when they all left my house to go play in the park this afternoon and it was clear that I wasn't invited. Ouch.

So now I sit here tonight in the silence that happens in big huge empty houses, and I wonder if they will ever invite me in again. I hate that I made it clear that they weren't good enough to be my friends, because I'm pretty sure I was wrong. They may not be the people I have shared the last three years of my life with, but they were perfectly willing to share the next three years. The hardest misery is misery brought upon oneself, and this is my consequence for running and for my cold heart. I pray that I can learn to let them in, and I pray that I can see how blessed I am to have a group of amazing people standing in front of me and asking to be my friends. It's all a part of moving on. It's all about learning to let go.

Tonight as I returned to my empty house, I looked up and noticed the beauty of the early fall sunset. It gave me warmth within my soul to know that God would still let me glimpse something so beautiful when I am acting so ugly. I am unworthy of the beauty that God hands to me, and yet He thinks I'm worth it anyways. To know He still stands there when I'm running full speed the other way completely blows my mind. So I walk outside and stop to take a deep breath as I glance upward. I thank Him for what He gives me, and I ask Him to help my heart believe that the beauty of His best is really what IS best. The evidence is in the vibrancy of the setting sun over the hills. And oh, are the colors breathtaking.