The Only Thing Constant in Life Is...

CHANGE.

I've done it before. When I was 16 I left my high school friends behind and spent 7 weeks in Germany. When I was 18 I left my home in North Carolina behind to go to college in Michigan. When I was 20 I left my friends at college behind to spend a year in Vienna, Austria. When I was 25 I left my life in Michigan behind to move back home to North Carolina. 6 months after that I moved to Dallas, where I didn't know a single person. I spent the last 5 years of my life there.

So it has come as a great shock to me that I have found myself so lonely in Mt. Vernon. I keep thinking, "I've done this before! It shouldn't be this hard!" Especially after living here for four months. I expected that it would be hard at first and then get easier, but now I'm realizing that it was easy at first and seems to be getting harder.

As someone put this last week, "You feel like you've been invited to a big family reunion, but you're not part of the family." I feel like people here have things in their lives that are important to them, and I have no frame of reference to talk with them, to connect. I don't know anything about local politics, whether it's at the local hospital, the local school, the local tire plant, or whatever. I don't know anything about farming, local parades, local sports teams, or whatnot. I want to talk with people, to connect with them; what have they struggled with, what do they want out of life? Do they want anything more than to show up every day at work and just make it through another day? What are their hopes and aspirations? What do they hope to accomplish in life? I feel like there have been just a handful of people I've met who have any desire to talk about things that go beyond the surface. But I feel stuck, because most people here already have friends. I have a need to connect, and they don't. That need is met, and has been since they were born. They have no need to talk with me, to get to know me, the way I need to get to know them. At the end of the day, people are people, and I know that we all struggle with the same things, regardless of our life circumstances, but I don't know how to talk with people about what's important to them, and in return, I don't feel like people know what's important to me. Just as I have no frame of reference with people in Mt. Vernon, I feel like they have no frame of reference to connect with me. I feel like I'm speaking a different language than people here. It's not that either of us are right or wrong, simply that we aren't communicating, and I'm feeling very isolated in the process.

But God has a purpose in it all. It's all about what He wants, not what I want, and He will provide for all my needs, in measure with the abundant riches he has. I met someone else in a group at church that said that they moved here from somewhere else, and they too have struggled to make friends. I just got a call from them today, because they wanted to see how I was doing. It totally made my day. Last night I came home from a day trip to Fairview Heights (the hour drive there of which I spent bawling out of homesickness), and Ryan had Charles Stanley on TV, and he was giving a sermon on... lonliness. He suggested, among other things, to stay connected to Jesus, and to reach out to others so as not to be consumed with a selfishness and self-pity. It was just what I needed. Today I called up a friend of mine who has herself suffered at time from lonliness, and although I meant the call to be an encouagement for her, she encouraged me much more in return. I think that God is going to show himself in ways I never could have imagined, that I never would need as long as things were going the way I planned. She has been listening to Joyce Meyer's Battlefield of the Mind (a book I read through with a friend several years ago) and reminded me that it's important to keep a positive attitude, that the battle happens first in the mind. That was really something I needed to hear.

So no, life is not easy. (To quote The Princess Bride, which Ryan and I watched this week, "Life is pain, your Highness, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something.") But God has already won the battle. This world is not my home, so any sense of permanence anywhere, whether in Dallas or Mt. Vernon or whatever, is illusory at best. I would rather be where God wanted me to be, than to be where I wanted to be (which currently is Dallas!) and outside of His will. In John 14:18, Jesus says, "I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you." As long as I have the Holy Spirit inside of me, I have nothing to fear.