Maybe you don’t, but I have days where I just don’t know what I’m doing. I mean, in general–as in, I don’t know why I’m alive and on this planet. I suppose this sense of disorientation is uniquely and also probably universally human. And I suppose most folks don’t resolve it until late in life, if ever. I guess a few people are born with an iron-clad sense of Purpose: Princesses, maybe? Megalomaniacs? I suspect that kind of Purpose becomes just as oppressive as not having a Purpose eventually, so I’m not itching for it.
And it’s not like I completely lack Purpose. I know I’m here to love God and share His love with others. But, honestly, that doesn’t answer a lot of questions I have on a daily basis, like, Why me? What am I supposed to be doing with my life? Of all the things I could do today, which should I do? Does it matter if I do or don’t do them?
I haven’t found answers to any of those questions, but I have discovered this–that there are moments in my life that I return to over and over with a sense of gratitude and awe. As in, I feel for just a moment that it’s all been worth it–all the confusion and pain and loss and aimlessness and annoyance and heartache–because I got to see this, or do this, or feel this. In all of these memories, there lingers the sense that for a moment I got to wipe the fog off the glass, or break through it altogether, to What Really Matters. To God, I guess.
- Holding onto the branches in the top of our cherry tree when I was 9 while the winds from a coming thunderstorm whipped them around
- Swimming underwater in Lake Michigan with the sun coming through and lighting up the turquoise water and the white sand
- Sitting at a fire in a village in Mali at night under a full moon and listening to women singing songs before a wedding
- Flying over the Sahara
- Seeing Fuji breaking through the clouds on my flight back from Baekyangsa Temple in Korea
- Sitting at my dining room table after Thanksgiving dinner with a big pot of tea listening to family and friends laughing and talking.
- Seeing my shadow cast by the rising sun on the clouds below Queen’s Chair on the Sandia Crest
- Listening to the gaelic psalms sung at the Free Church in Stornaway, Isle of Lewis
- Sitting in my friend Tsehay’s garage watching her make injera and using a piece she handed me hot off the griddle to eat a plate of fresh atakilt wat
- Sitting in the big bay window at Angelus Hut in Nelson Lakes in front of the wood stove with dry clothes and a hot cup of tea listening to the rain we had just been hiking in lash the eaves
- Every time I’ve been on the Isle of Skye
- Every time I see the ocean
Your turn: have you had Breakthrough Moments? What are they?
The Rookery 