I saw Slumdog Millionaire tonight...

Sometimes at night after a long day or when I have a lot on my mind, I pull into Crawford and park my car way down in the very corner of the big parking lot where it's dark because the street light is broken. I park my car there and I turn off the engine and I just listen. Away from the buildings and students and lights. I listen to the wind outside. I listen to it howling through the crack in my car door window. And I watch the trees in front of me sway and dance, and I see the stars shining brightly through the leaves...

Tonight I thought about how the boy living in the tin shelter halfway across the world and I see the same stars. I thought about it and my heart almost broke. I feel sick tonight. Heart sick. But the thing that makes me sickest is the fact that I know that I will wake up tomorrow and have forgotten the whole thing and move on. And if not tomorrow, then the next day. Or the next. Nothing ever stays. O Lord, I long for the day when your eternal kingdom will come to stay! A kingdom that will not be shaken!

Even this restlessness inside of me comes and goes with my homework load, my stress levels, the weather... It makes me shudder to think how easily that feeling fades... God, have mercy!

But then something triggers it and I know it's not gone. Like tonight. I don't understand how people can sit through that and then get up and go back to their cars and their heated houses and their fast food and their homework and routines and schedules and let it all wash away as if nothing ever happened.

But it happens.

It makes me sick. But it makes me sickest because I know that it will happen to me too. It will happen to me too because I am tied here like everyone else. For now. Because I will not be content with ease. I am free, I think -- I am no slave to the world's game! But then why do I lose sight so easily?? How does comfort take hold of me so stealthily??? It is always two steps forward and then backwards one! Sometimes even backwards two. Or three...

My greatest fear is that I will become content with never taking those two steps forward because I have become too tired of doing the same work twice. Lord, do not let me ever tire of doing what is good!

I wanted to drive away tonight. To get on the highway and just go. Even though deep inside I knew that wouldn't solve anything, it just seemed like the right thing to do. What am I doing here? Why me? Why have I been given this life? But what would I do anywhere else? What makes me think that I can do anything?

....sometimes it's good to be heart sick....and to sit and ask impossible questions.....and to pour out your bitterness and your frustration to God...

But sometimes I want to be more than a question. Sometimes I want to be more than a dream. More than an offering plate donation. More than a short term missions trip. More than a prayer. SO MUCH more than a happy suburb family. More than my homework stress. More than my consuming relational drama. More than a speck of dust on the face of an infinite planet at the hands of an Infinite God. What is man that You are mindful of him?

Who am I?