I just got home from an amazing ten days in Texas to a found sweet vintage road bike, a dinner of whole grain rice, our favorite lentil dish, and carrot sticks, and my favorite roommates. And a card from my Ma which had arrived sometime during my time away. The front made me cry and what dropped out when I opened it made me cry more. The name of this blog "Perhaps we are here..." is from a Rilke poem and he's one of my favorite poets. The front of the card contained these words by the very same poet:

"I beg you...to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answers."

I feel as though this is my life recently. Perhaps I ought to be more like my peers who are settling into home ownership and child training and career tracking, but I am not. And if there is one thing this season is teaching me more than anything else, it is that my future may not ever look like anyone else's future, but that's okay. Also, my present might not look like anyone's present, but that's okay. Also, my calling and values might be different than others' calling and values, but that's okay. Also, my sanctification process will be different, but that's okay. Also, I may not have the answers today, but that's okay. Also, everything is going to be okay.

So, dear readers (those five or six of you who are left after URL changing and a severe lack of anything worth reading), here's one thing I need you to know: things are not okay, but they are going to be okay. My heart, my soul, my mind, my dreams, my awareness sin, my prayers, my faith, my lacks, my vision, my hope--these things are not okay, they are precarious and feeble and teetering and maybe, deeply in, there are good things happening, but not today. Not now. But there will be. There will be okay again.

How do I know this? I don't know. I think for maybe the first time in my life I have no guarantee of okay in this lifetime. But what's different now is that I'm okay with that.