As finals week approaches and I am overwhelmed with work, I should be writing a bibliography for my completed research paper and outlining my final literary analysis paper on Star Trek and Salman Rushdie. However, I find myself in an increasingly reflective mood as not only finals, but my college graduation, approaches.
This reflective mood moves me to open an old journal of mine, written at age eleven. As I struggle to decipher my terrible penciled handwriting to read the crude school-girl outpourings of irritation at my brothers, frustration with school, and a salad days crush, I notice that some lines shine out like a beacon on the page. I find that many of the things I was saying at age eleven I am still saying thirty years later:
God is wonderful. God is teaching me to trust me with small things so that I may learn to trust him with big things. God is answering my prayers every day. My heart is overflowing with love. I long for Jesus to return. I miss and long to see again the dear loved one who have gone on before (so very very many more to miss and long for, thirty years later— so great a cloud of witnesses). I am learning how precious it is to sit quietly and let God’s love pervade my soul.
As the world around me appear to be falling apart and sorrows are coming in like a flood, both in my own community and in the world at large, it comforts my heart that the most important things in life never change.