moving

Vulnerable. I both love and loath the word. God keeps asking me to live like this, to live open and soft in a world that isn't always warm and caring. Not just vulnerable with the few people who are close to me, but vulnerable with the people He places in my path. To live life with people, but also to let them live life with me. 

This is difficult for me under normal circumstances, but in two and a half weeks I'm moving somewhere new, to begin a new chapter in this story called life. Anyone who I have talked to about this has seen my smile, my excitement for a new adventure, my longing for change. But what no one has seen are the tears that I have cried, the inner anguish I have gone through. No one has seen how this decision has rent my heart in two. This is not how I would have written my story. 

I would not have written a chapter where I move away from the home I picked for myself and the life I built. The story I would have written would have included a house with a big backyard and a husband and some beautiful children and a dog and a garden and no painful uprooting or transplanting. That's the way I would have written life. Vulnerability would not be difficult in my story because there would be no risk. But I suppose that wouldn't really be vulnerability. 

We don't get to wrap life up into a neat, pretty package tied up with a bow. We don't get vulnerability without risk. We don't get to determine how other people will react or respond to us. Being vulnerable would be easy if we were all perfect people, but we aren't. We are perfectly messy. 

We all bring our own baggage and mess into our relationships. Mine tells me to stop being open and vulnerable because then it won't be as difficult to leave and move into the next chapter. My baggage says that I should just tie up this last chapter of my life now, not stay open and continue to invest for these last few weeks before I go. It says stop now or the end will hurt even more. 

The problem with that is that my baggage isn't the Truth, and my God is. And my God says that I must live open to actually live. I must live open to live full. I cannot accept only the joy, but I must embrace sorrow as well. And I have to trust that somewhere in the middle of all this messy-ness and vulnerability and pain and joy and sorrow I will find Shalom.