thoughts from krakow

     Five days ago I took a train by myself for the first time in my life. And two days ago I managed to make it from one European country to another by myself for the first time (if you need it, now is the moment for applause for Linden not getting lost or dying! Although I did totally not realize one of my trains was a connecting train.. so I did think I was very lost for a brief period of time... and that I might die.. but I didn’t!!) When I go home to the states in nine days I will be a very different person than when I set out at the beginning of the month.
     In the midst of all my travels lately I’ve been thinking a lot about experiential learning. No matter how many times you explained public transport to me a month ago I wouldn’t have really understood how to get on the right train until I tried and messed up and succeeded in a tangible, experiential, way (which involved a confused train steward yelled at me in Czech that this was, indeed the last station, and why was I still on the train?!)
     In a much more momentous way, this month has been a month where I learned experientially about God’s faithfulness. This time last year I was coming out of a really rough patch. I was anxious and lost in my own head, and I didn’t have the perspective to know that what I was feeling wasn’t permanent. When I went to Czech for the first time last summer to teach English for a short-term mission trip it was a life-shifting experience. I got to explore the world outside of my own for the first time, and experience fulfillment, love, and joy in a whole new way than I had before. I was scared to go home from our English camp, because I didn’t want those feelings to fade back to the low thoughts and feelings that had come with my anxiety. But once I was home, I was able to find joy in the community and family and experiences I had at home in Dekalb, and within that comfort and growth I began to think that I was past the old fear. I spent months looking forward to being back at camp, with the same people and emotions that had been so vital the summer before. When I found out in the spring that the same camp wouldn’t be happening this summer it put me back inside the fear; back to feeling like I wasn’t able to control my ability to experience joy and fulfillment, and maybe that I wasn’t even deserving of them. It wasn't super rational, and I knew as a concept that God’s character was loving; I’d seen him provide in different ways, but conceptual knowledge wasn’t enough to permeate the feeling of loss at all that the last year’s camp had represented to me. It felt like the loss of a lot more than just the camp itself. In all honesty, I was kind of half-hearted in first signing up for a different Czech trip that was going to a different city. I was excited, but it sounded exhausting to invest in a whole new group of people, and I was still feeling out of control and untrusting when I looked ahead at what a new Czech experience would be.
     But then camp actually happened. And I fell in love with a new city, and dozens of new, absolutely incredible people. My heart was grown and filled so much within a week that when I thought to myself “God is faithful!” it wasn’t just a conceptual thought. It wasn’t thinking that air is what your lungs need, it was having breathed in deeply when you’ve needed most to catch your breath. I had seen in real time my doubts and fears, and insecurities being undone as I lived out something new. God took every feeling of fear, insecurity, inadequacy, and anxiety, and was faithful as he turned each one into something beautiful. I got to experience a whole new level of  joy, fulfillment, purpose, and an overwhelming sense of home in this summer's experience in Czech. And I had no idea that would happen, but God absolutely did. All the way back when I was doubting and untrusting.
    And that experiential knowledge does a lot more than conceptual knowledge, because now I can act off of it. I can step off the train, and into new places of trust and confidence. Sometimes all it takes is the fear of whether you will have joy, or the panic of connecting-train-confusion, in order to reach the destination of a beautiful view in Krákow, or a whole new faith and trust in God.

Here’s to feeling a whole lot more adult as a new 19 year old, and to everything else God has in store. :)