When I moved the blog from Typepad to WordPress I gave it the byline:  the journey there…and back again.  You might remember that phrase from The Lord of the Rings.  It seemed to sum up my life pretty succinctly.  I feel like the human boomerang.  Thrown across the ocean only to arc backwards and bounce back to the place I started from.  This is as figurative as it is literal.

We have tickets to fly back to China today but we’re not going to make that flight.  Instead I’ll likely be ironing dress slacks for an interview or working on my writing sample for my MFA application form.  Life is unpredictable and complicated.

I’m not really sad that we’re not leaving for the Middle Kingdom today.  I’m disappointed that it didn’t work out like we wanted.  I grieve for my wife’s feelings of loss and the separation from our community in China.  I am confident that we have made the right decision for our family.  She is, too. The feeling of wholeness and healing that has come with self-awareness is more than worth the cost of getting here.  The peace that passes my understanding is better than the constant vacillating and dark depression I faced before.

At a 48-hour prayer retreat recently I was reading about the life of David and the life of Christ.  I think the Lord lead me to read them because of the strong sense these men both showed of knowing who they were.  David threw off Saul’s armor because he hadn’t tested it–he wasn’t used to it, he knew it didn’t suit him.  David also went against others’ “wise” counsel and the people’s wishes many times in pursuit of his relationship with God.  He asked God what he thought about things, but he also took the battle wherever it lead him and exercised great freedom from within the context of his close relationship with God.

Jesus also displayed this rock-solid confidence in who He was and what His purposes were.  So much of his ministry in the book of John was addressing and over-turning religious concepts of what or who others thought that He was supposed to be.  He even asks Peter, “Who do you say that I am?”  Jesus was looking for the right answer from Peter; he was not asking for Peter’s help defining Himself.  David and Jesus really seemed to be writing their own story–the one that God was blessing.  They were not playing roles in somebody else’s play.

Viewing these two men walking with the Lord in the confidence of their own skin really gave me a sense of peace that I could live the same way.  Especially in light of the freedom that Paul tells us we have.  With a relational God of love, freedom is a natural catalyst; it fuels both the relationship and the capability for love.

So sometimes missing a flight on purpose is the best decision one can make.  It takes the journey off the page and away from the original script into a world where one must ad lib and find the transparent thread that leads into the new tale.  If you know who you are, and more importantly who God is to you, you can write your own story.  And stories with surprise endings are often much more enjoyable to read…