I want to live a life that’s truly incredible.
I wrote those encapsulating words at the top of the leather
brown, white page journal, carried across the countries by my sister to bring
it from Ecuador to me. I was now sitting in a place I’d come to strangely
adore, the swing outside the pool house outside the celebrity mansion (not even
kidding) my uncle had rented for the side of the family I still wasn’t used to
seeing.
The swing faced the river, pulsing and rushing. Just as my
thoughts.
We’d rushed through a movie the night before. The sounds, sights,
and energy of The Greatest Showman seems
to get me. He pursues a dream. He realizes a dream. He lives. He finds talent.
He develops the people. He lives a life that truly incredible. And he sings and
dances.
I’m likely far too easily inspired and flipside discouraged;
propelled and doubting; amazed and jealous; convicted and self-condemned.
I found the Olympics so inspiring when I was a wide-eyed, still
wonder-filled and constantly wondering girl. It made me, in my creaky brown
chair surrounded by Oregon trail maps in my sixth-grade history
classroom-project my “your future: a timeline” assignment to include four
Olympic games, all resulting in gold medals (in a sport I left tbd).
I was drawn to the power of the truly incredible.
And it didn’t stop. I’d see Shawn Johnson plastered on coke cans,
and I wanted to plaster my life with the thrill of hard work and pursuit I saw
in her. I’d walk by a Monet in the Art Institute of Chicago, and I’d want to
stare into its depths and draw deep within to create. I’d see the movements of
dancing and want to go train for the ballet. I’d hear the piercing solo and
decide that the opera was the best place to be. I’d hear and see and watch and
listen to the stories of overcoming, the visions of creating, the tales of
those who dared enough to try and do, and I’d vow that the truly incredible
life was among their numbers.
I was drawn to the power of the truly incredible.
But it was clear to me that my life wasn’t there yet. I’d ride my
bike down the only first coated asphalt roads with the gravel from the yet
unfished driveways leading up to the not yet built houses. Pedals pumping, my
mind raced faster than even my eleven-year-old feet, and once I made it home I
made my way right to a piece of notebook paper from a half-started and
half-fished, magazine collaged notebook. I titled this fine piece: get
motivated. And I wrote a diatribe of how we are made for so much more, how we
need to realize the amazing possibilities ahead of us, how we needed to step
into the game, fight the fight, take up the chase. Live the exceptional life.
I was drawn to the power of the truly incredible.
Yet I didn’t realize that longing for this type of this
big-picture life had incredible power over my small-picture days.
For the days added to days added to days and days, and standing
back, six years later, I’d begun to see what truly incredible hadn’t brought
me. At seventeen, I was leaving my parent’s house, never to move permanently
back in again. And in those moments of change, I realized much of what hadn’t
changed: my constant dissatisfaction with the way my life was in the incessant
push for more.
College then meant I bore burdens of not meeting my own
expectations for truly incredible and lerned to bury the hope for it and
instead be buried by unsettledness and restlessness. I started to do some
things that were truly incredible, in other ways: forgetting that family is a
lifeblood, that friends are meant for support, that loving with my life was a
risk but which left untaken resulted in a living death.
But now freshman year of real life is bringing me back, helping me
to finally put words to it, this truly incredible restless drive that’s been as
an undercurrent silently championing my days.
I was sitting next to her at a faded, light pink, slightly sticky
four-top table, my chips drowning in salsa even as her plate seemed to be
drowning in salad leaves. She was asking how it was to have my sister now moved
in with me as I was now still slightly surprised, walking into my home and
seeing her face once more, my old world and new world colliding.
You
know, it’s crazy. Having her here is reminding me of how selfish I am. I am
rude to her in a way that I’m just not to everyone else. Things she does that
shouldn’t bug me totally do. I shouldn’t care that she thinks to ask if my
friends have food allergies, what day the garbage comes on, and at what time
the dog eats. But I do! And it drives me crazy.
And it echoed in my heart, later: what if you learned to love her,
actually?
I’d been standing by the TV as a friend opened up about the
anxiety that had started to creep back into her nights again, getting hit with
the pain and wishing violently that I could take it away. I’d sat next to her
on the denim blue couch and did what I knew to do best, sometimes: bring
laughter.
And it echoed in my heart, later: what if you learned to trust
her, actually?
I’d been scrolling through pages and pages of the latest release I
was working on for work. It was approximately 11:38 PM, and the five hours of
sleep per night this week were making me feel like I was back in college again
and then like I suddenly had aged a decade cause I couldn’t comprehend how my
sprightly self had pulled that off for so long. But the words were becoming
more than a part of my job and becoming something the Holy Spirit was working
through. That the gospel doesn’t just start our walk with the Lord, it’s the
pool we swim in (Greear). That it’s not the way according to which we’re
supposed to live; it is the storyline of our very life.
And it echoed in my heart, later: what if you learned to believe
it, actually?
I’d never seen Hercules. When his friend Meg appeared on the screen
as I appeared through the door back from work, I’d scoffed. Manipulative, girly
white women. On the top of my list of things I can’t stand that I can’t stand.
But the minutes kept ticking, and Meg grew on me even as Hercules genuine
goodness baffled me. Him, passing his test, glowing yellow-gold, being embraced
by his family, sees Meg walking away and pulls her in and the words “For a true
hero isn’t measured by the size of his strength, but by the strength of his
heart.”
And it echoed in my heart, later: what if you learned to live with
your heart, actually?
For, I’ve always been drawn to the power of the truly incredible.
But, I’m learning that maybe it’s truly incredible that I’ve been
so incredibly blind to the truth. Maybe it’s not so much that our life is a
chasing after achieving the magnificent, but it’s opening our eyes to the
reality that life is magnificent.
Love, actually.
Trust, actually.
Belief, actually.
Life, actually.
That we love because we are loved. That we trust because we have
an unshakable trust. That we believe because we have hope. That we have life
because we chose to remember His death.
That it’s truly incredible we’ve been entrusted to bear his image
in all the ways He imagines our days. In the way we get to be faithful to
remembering to delight in Him in the now. In the way we get to hold our
relationships even as He holds our futures.
That He, end game, is the power of the truly incredible, and our
hearts are so restless until they find rest in Him (Aristotle). And we, end
game, are chosen to be His.
What truly incredible power.
