The unknown

I remember because I will never forget. Our child, oldest to be specific didn’t do new things or leaving mother well. Sunday school, occasional day care, kindergarten, ballet, soccer, new babysitters: trauma. We would assure her she was fine and we would talk through things at home and it was great until mom/dad had to separate and walk away. She knew she was fine, she could communicate that to us but then she would go into hyperventilate freak out stage.

Of course I am Different. On the outside at least I portray a very calm demeanor and nothing can rattle my cage. And then as my friend so eloquently put it, I am paddling frantically like a duck under water.

The new and the unknown is scary. I am sitting at a breakfast nook far from home anticipating the new. Today I walk into the seminary building and begin a on campus portion of a class. This is all new to me. The books are hard. The textual essays make no sense. The writing center shoes me how much I don’t know about academic writing. The comments other people make on the forums I wonder if I am in the same world much less the same class and reading the same book.

Jesus did “new” amazingly well. Except for the fact that he created everything gave him a head start in new, his response to new situations was to think and contemplate and be slow to speak. My response to new situations is to crouch, hide and run if possible. It’s not really a thinking moment. If, perhaps I get caught in the new and need to speak, it’s usually not with thought, contemplation or wise words.

So today, I will try to be more like Jesus than myself. In any day, that is a good solution to what we face when we think we have no clue what we are doing,

When caught in between a rock and a hard place, Jesus talked to the father.

When people were pressing him for answers that were ridiculous, he simply looked at them and was silent. Silence does odd things to people. Of course so does writing in the sand, Jesus had a way of simply taking the stress out of a situation. Awkward moments he takes away the awk and moves it forward. When caught in a struggle, he tells a story.

So today I am walking into the new chapter of my life with seminary, on campus, and I will keep telling myself to be like Jesus. Listen, smile, listen, smile, talk to God and then if I find words, speak. If I feel totally confused, pretend the others do to: they probably are. If I feel a bit left out and not sure, I don’t need to be confidant, I just need to be there. And in the midst of being a bit apprehensive God always does this little sign for me. I know it. It’s happened often enough I get it now. I can smile and say, no worries God. You just returned the rest to stressed. See if you move the letters around in stressed, you get rested and you even have a remainder of 2. God usually does that. He always gives us what we need and then a few leftovers.