Getting Ready

I'm packing up the parts of my life I want to bring with me to Jordan, and I'm struck again by the recognition of the peripatetic, almost nomadic, nature of my life. From the comfort of home to the home of school to my family to a friend's family in another state, back to school, back to my family, and now off to a foreign country for more than two months, I've traveled a lot since January and I've had a lot of fun doing it. The result of all this traveling is that I have packing down almost to a science. Underwear, socks, and undershirts on this side of the suitcase; t-shirts and shorts rolled up on that side as a foundation for the flat-laying polo shirts and jeans; Dopp kit with hygiene essentials over here; extra razor blades and extra bottles and tubes of this and that over there; don't forget the deodorant. Pull out the garment bag, lay out the jacket, shirts, and slacks; don't forget the collar stays in a pocket. The laptop bag holds the computer, the iPod, the Kindle, and chargers of all sorts. My life reduced to a few bags.

I don't know what the next two months will hold. Of course I have a rough outline of class time, weekend trips, and a mid-term vacation to Egypt, but this summer is an exercise in ceding control. After all, I'm not even guaranteed language credit from participating in this immersion program and receiving satisfactory marks--I have to take the ACTFL to satisfy the registrar. I was talking to a friend last night, and she told me that my anxiety about that uncertainty is, in addition to being an unproductive pastime that serves nothing but its own degenerative cycle, an indication of my lack of willingness to trust God. In the first half of Matthew 6:34, Christ says, "Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself." Anxiety is not just a waste of time and effort; it is disobedience to God. In exerting undue care for the future, I engage in a separation of my will from God's and a removal of my soul from God's order. In attempting to control everything around me, I ignore the lesson I learned last semester: that my relationship with God hinges on my ability to accept my place in the order of things and my willingness to subject myself to him.

Thus, my goal for the next few days, and going forward into the next couple of months, is to mitigate this anxiety. Spiritually, this means I'll be refocusing from myself to God, from the reasons for my worry (my desire for control, my desire for comfort, my desire to fulfill my appetites, &c.) to the reason for my hope. Practically, this means spending more time reading my Bible (yeah, that book I should pick up more often) and meditating and praying, in addition to the more philosophical work of spending some time each day in authors like Lewis and Chesterton (assuming I have any free time).

In this sense, this imperative of proximity to God, this summer may be just what he wants for me.