No Fear
In less than ten weeks’ time, things are going to change.
It’s a little funny. Right now, merely four miles separate us. Still, it takes an hour to get from Point A to Point B, because of a pesky river and the width of this small-but-congested island. In ten weeks, Point B will relocate itself to a point 215 miles away. That’s 50 times further away — but it will take somewhere between 4 and 6 hours to travel between Points A and B. 50 times further, but the trip is only 4-6 times longer. It doesn’t seem so bad.
But it’s not just distance. Other things will change. Weekday dinners, for instance, will cease to exist for thirteen months. Every other weekend visit will be erased from the calendar. And the ones that remain will be truncated significantly. The phone and webcam will substitute for actual presence. The number of shared experiences will decrease. And all the while, a whole new world will open up in Point B, filled with new people, new duties, new surroundings.
People ask how I feel about this. To be honest, I’m not really sure. It makes me a little sad. It makes me a little nervous. But I know it’s not throwing me into a panic. And that surprises me.
Usually, I like knowing what’s going to happen to me. Somewhere in this otherwise-calm exterior lives a little cartoonish-looking character who has a nagging habit of jumping up and down while banging a wooden spoon on a pot. She yells and screams for attention, all at once begging and demanding to be informed. WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT? she yells. WHAT WILL BECOME OF ME? She causes such a ruckus and stirs me so much within that I often give in to her urgent cries and join in her noisy fray. And I become her.
But curiously, she’s quiet these days. Maybe she got tired the last time around, from all that screeching that caused me a couple weeks of misery. Or maybe she learned her lesson. In either case, she’s sleeping like a heavily-sedated patient in a hospital. Because not only is she sleeping, she’s resting. And yes, there is a difference.
One can sleep without resting. Sleep can be induced by the exhaustion caused by unending worry and anxiety. Resting, though, involves relinquishment and giving things up so that one can be actively inactive. Sleep alone is merely collapse. Resting requires trust and faith in the midst of uncertainty.
The character inside is resting, and so am I — at least for the time being. I don’t know what the future holds. Things may not work out. The 215 miles for 390 days may prove too great a burden for us to bear and too lengthy a challenge for us to survive. If that’s the case, that will be sad. It will be disappointing. It will even be depressing. But. There’s one thing it will never be. It won’t be a matter of chance. It will be a matter of God. And because of that, whatever “it” turns out to be will be okay.