Looking Both Ways

It's early Sunday morning, just a bit after 2:00am June 19th, and I feel as if this is the perfect time to be awake. I go outside, smell the Oregon rain-washed air, hear the water in the fountain falling softly, and then I listen to the sound of pure silence playing perfectly and somewhere behind all the other little noises. This is what midnight sounds like. The sun is on the other side of the world, and I quite like how suddenly this front-porch, which with the sun is a public thing, has become my temporary hiding place. I feel like this time of day is when I can think, when I can feel, and when I can breathe. Every now and again, a car will slowly drive by and remind me that I am not the only one awake at this hour. But I feel as though I am.

Dawn outside my room at the Heart to Heart Children's Village.

A year ago today, June 19, my time in Tegucigalpita, Heart to Heart Children's Village, Honduras was coming to a happy yet strangely unfinished ending. I opened to this chapter of life in my old journal and smiled as I breathed in the scent of the pages smothered with ink, food stains, and memories, and tried to read my scribbled-in-the-dark words which brought to life the vivid descriptions of the beautiful children and their full eyes, dancing and laughing and inviting me into their family, and teaching me about the simplicity of love. I packed these pages with ten days of Honduras bliss, and then I went home and had a lot of questions, a lot of thoughts, and a lot more pages to write.

So I put that journal away and took out the next one. When that one was done, I took out the next. I have written through seven journals since then. Huge journals with huge pages, I am talking. Thousands of pages and hundreds of thousands of words...sit on the highest shelf of my closet and remember the things I told them to.

Maybe some of those secrets have grown old. But I dare believe most of them would still crack a smile, refrain a laugh, or shed a tear.

....Some memories I will hold in my heart forever, and some I will not, simply because I can't. Life can't be based on what I remember. I cannot live from my past, no matter how wonderful or terrible it might have been. To me, my journals are beautiful books: they are stories of everything that has happened between the depths of my heart and the depths of God's.

My words are my footprints through life, and footprints always leave a mark.... But there is a time when one must decide...which way to go now?

I have looked both ways: back by flipping through the stained pages of my journals, and forward... straight into the bright eyes of Jesus...full of more stories than my pen and hand could ever acquire.

I have looked both ways, and chosen forwards. How ready and how excited I am to pioneer onwards. I move into a story that is more real than what I've written with my pen, a future more tangible than my pages, and a destiny that hasn't merely been scribbled as riddles and poems, hidden between yellow pages for nobody to ever see, but a destiny that grows clearer, stronger, and brighter with each passing day for me and the world to discover.

I move in closer than before, I press in deeper than before, and I hunger harder than before; for I am after Jesus, and Jesus alone.