Honesty Pants

Go ahead. Change my name in your phone to "American Economy" - because at this point, I'm all about meltdowns and crises.

Spoiler alert: The thing the fancy PhD commencement speakers conveniently leave out on graduation day in their dry speech with obnoxiously big words you still don't understand, even after a $100,000 education, is this: what it's like to be a caterpillar stuck inside the cocoon.


Did anyone ask the caterpillar if it was claustrophobic before nature shoved it into that tiny space? Did anyone ask the caterpillar if it wanted to be a butterfly? Maybe it had the spiritual gift of contentment and was living the dream with its six legs?

Today, I'm a claustrophobic caterpillar.

Life is currently taunting me with this weird twilight zone of life transition. Growing up, and overall life transitions I would say, in theory are freakishly similar to learning how to ride a bike. Riding a bike takes coordination. Can't say I have a surplus amount of coordination. The picture below is proof. If I needed that much protection will eight wheels, how much do you think I needed when this thing called a bike downsized to two?

Right now I'm student teaching which means a lot of things, but it mostly means getting up in the morning and remembering who Jesus is and that He lives inside me and that no one should ever allow the 18 year-old version of herself decide what they want to do with the rest of her life.

Right now also means I have a lot of big and little things to be grateful for, and it also means I have a lot of ugly and immature parts about myself and my faith parading around like a fat man jiggling nakedly through Central Park on a crisp, fall afternoon.


Life, the first couple steps beyond college, has been like learning how to walk after having mastered the crawl. If school has been your life's agenda, it's familiar. It's structured. It plays within the rules.

But when what you know comes to a close, life stops giving you clean-cut waffles and gives you spaghetti instead. New rules, new expectations, new places, new people- and this new realm is messy. I may or may not have gotten so angry at the idea of transition, I may or may not have given a fist-shake toward the sky punctuated with verbal smack-down of "WHY CAN'T YOU PLAY BY THE RULES!"

But when I stop, I realize what I mean is "Why won't this play by MY rules?" 


So this is what I am learning and re-learning, learning and re-learning: 

Trust during the Transition. 

Ah.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Repeat.

So when the unfamiliar feels like learning how to ride a bike after someone else stole my beloved training wheels - I must urgently remember: Trust the Lord in the Transition.

When the cocoon is suffocating, I cannot afford to forget butterflies do not develop in the bed of what they know. 

So today, I may still be embarrassingly bad at acting and dressing professional and I may still pretend 100% of the time to know what I'm doing. And I still may whine about the fact that I can't wear tank-tops and my highlighter neon pink Vans from 8-4, but my Spirit will resolve. Each day, my Spirit will resolve to trust.

The future me needs the present me to rely on the Holy Spirit, to breathe and trust, breathe and trust, breathe and trust and remember God is doing what He does best - transforming life through the transition.