One wild year-

It has been a wild year, as a nomad the year biking to southern Chile was easier. But as far as life experience I learned just as much if not more than my year on the road. There are challenges in life that are greater than biking 12,000 miles. One is pursuing a relationship, why is it that the most important lessons in life are sometimes learned too late. I moved up to Chicago last fall, after working for the summer. I was hoping to get into Wheaton Graduate School, which I did, but the scholarship that I was applying for fell through, and then in the process of looking for a job did not work out, and then as my relationship with Devon was falling apart this left me reeling for a life line. So I did something to try and get some air, I broke up with Devon and started making plans to get out of the country. Around December I started making plans to go to Africa, but I did not just want to go to Africa but to bike across the continent. It was not a good move, really my heart was not in a good place to go to Africa, I was running away. There is a difference between running away and living the life. I have learned over the last 4 months, even as I still feel like I have a nomad’s heart that I must journey from a healthy place. Running away from relationships and commitment is not being true to me. It has been a very humbling season of my life, and I have had to swallow a lot of my pride and ask for help.
So over the last few months I have done just that, I asked for help, I asked for others to walk with me, and I can honestly say for one of the first times in my life my heart found a home in my body.
On my bike I biked, but I also had lost part of myself out there, and lost part of my heart. And I lost part of my heart on Devon, lost part again in Chicago, and out there the confusion had rained down on my head. But in the cold snow of Chicago, alone I found all those missing parts as I laid on my back. To surrender is to find oneness. You see in my striving having starved my soul. I was striving to be so many things that I was not, and it was not until I said that I am lost could I be found.
The nomad had taken over, the desire to fit some normal mold had taken over and both of them battled within me and in the end I lost. So now I am holding on to the truth that I do not have to do anything to be me, I just have to be. And to be me I know that the truth is not in me alone, but in God. It toke a lot of hurt and tears to find out that the best that I can give, does not include in its agenda running away. Actually I am back to where I started a year ago, back in Oklahoma, working for the summer. I am back at the beginning, and it hurts to be here. I think about the words spoken and the race I feel like I lost, but in truth I need to see it as a new start This time to not to get it right, but rather to be. In my heart I have had to learn to let go, quit the chasing, quit the running, and quit living in dreams, but to let reality be present in this place.
I am sending in an application to take on some studies in the fall. I am doing the last thing that I think that I thought I wanted to do, which is the best thing. To take some steps, to nestle into a place for a few years, to surround myself with some books and a good church for a few years and to dive deep into some hearts and allow my own heart to be discovered in the deep places. To know ourselves we can only be known as we know the maker and to find the maker one must surrender from playing the game and trying to pretend to be the mask before us.

I make this promise to write in this blog as my heart journeys not just in miles pedaled but in the journey of the heart as discovery and the discovered.