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One day I learned that life is not a neat little parcel you can tie up with a string and send home to mom with a note that says "isn't it beautiful?"

It's not simple, it's not easy, it's not always fun. Anyone who tells you otherwise has likely not experienced significant hardship or suffering. I'm reading a beautiful book by Madeline L'Engle right now called Two Part Invention, where she juxtaposes the sheer joy of meeting and marrying her husband with the pain of losing him to cancer much later in life. It's an eloquently prepared piece and it has me thinking a lot about the theme of light and darkness side by side, the painful and the beautiful right there together.

I don't know what sense to make of it all at this point except to say that i'm truly learning to weather the hard times clinging to an unseen hope, and finally starting to swallow the truth that life will never be "just peachy." As I sit here, bedroom windows open, staring at the clouds above me on a gorgeous, surprisingly warm February day, i'm reminded of those in other places who have no beds, no clothes, no food. Those people are no less human than I, and no less able to feel their circumstances.

We live in a world of shattered beauty, where things often don't make sense because they're broken. In the process of being restored, I groan to be fully made new, to embrace the day when I can truly say "I have overcome." The hope of such a day keeps me going when I walk alongside the destitute, when my heart aches with sadness, when old friends no longer call to hang out. I want a place of respite in the desert wilderness, my own place to call home and say "everything is right," but it's not guaranteed in this life and such a place is never safe-no, not now. Disease, economic depravation, the wearing of old age, rasps endlessly at the door. There's no escaping death... And yet, today i'm given life: a beautiful bike ride, a delicious breakfast, a new friend who reminds me of why good friends are a gift.

Beautiful and broken standing side-by-side, my simultaneously decaying body living alongside my eternal soul.

"Oh river, rise from your sleep!"