Cleaning can be fun.

Well, it can.

Oh, come on.

Okay, in seriousness, this is why I take forever to clean my room out/up. I'm merrily putting clothes away, minding my own business, when I stumble across a little piece of myself that I'd forgotten about. A picture, a piece of writing, some memory of something that was at one point really, really important.

As I was sorting through my 'portfolio' (the stack of design work accumulated from the last 3 years that usually resides in my closet and which has now been demoted to 'under the bed'), I came across a typography project from 2nd year. The design isn't half bad (Bodoni?! What was I thinking?), but the text really got me.

DERAILED

A wall of humid air hits me as I run from the cool, dark interior of the house. Slamming the front door behind me, I ignore the stares of the children playing nearby and head furiously away from home. Blind, I steer myself down the shoulder of a busy road, away from town and them. Cars rush by me, some swerving dangerously close, but I do not move away. Without checking for oncoming traffic, I take a sharp left onto a country road. A few steps inward and the sound of the traffic gives away to muffled stillness. The silence presses in around me as frantic thoughts roll uneasily around in my head.
Through forest and field I follow this road, until another intersects it. A lawnmower drones in the distance and a slight, urgent breeze rustles the leaves of nearby trees. Shadows drift across the cracked pavement as the sun slips in and out of sight behind gathering clouds.
I breathe deeply. My heart is pounding painfully, and I am unsure of where to turn.
Peering down the westward road, I can make out rust-brown rails dissecting the pastoral landscape and cutting a gouge northward. Where it is met by the road, a dormant signal stands, its deadened black eyes glaring through the shimmering heat. Mesmerized, I turn, and trudge down the lonely road towards it while stray whispers of thought chase circles around my head. On either side of the road, oak trees form a sweeping green corridor. Passing beneath it, I look up through the gnarled branches to see the sky start to darken. Dead leaves scrape dryly across the pavement, and a cloud of dust kicks up among the broken corn skeletons in a nearby field.
As I leave the trees, the whispers inside my head grow to an angry buzz, as a clap of thunder tears across the sky and the trees pitch and heave in a sudden gust of wind. Pale ghosts of the past winter swirl around me as I draw nearer and nearer, the dull gaze of the crossing signal boring through me. Above the wind, the sound of an ominous bellow swells to a crescendo. In an instant, the languid eyes of the signal explode to life, filling the air with light and sound. Fate, the voices inside my head taunt, has brought me here.
The growl of the approaching train builds and builds until even the storm is overcome and the buzzing in my ears becomes a painful throb. Gasping, I reach out with a white-knuckled hand for a nearby fencepost, dragging myself closer to the rails. Their surfaces glint like knife-edges, offering me a solution to the problems that drove me here in the first place. Closing my eyes, I feel the ground vibrate with pure energy as the train bursts out of the trees and roars past. Boxcars fly by me, on e blur after another, clanking and groaning only a foot from my grasp. My hair whips across my face, stinging my eyes, which are full of salty tears that collect and fall, shattering noiselessly on the gravel.
Car after car streaks by me, pounding my ears with deafening sound, and I scream. I scream at their recklessness, and I scream at the futility that I feel wrapping cold fingers around me. I scream until the world spins and the earth tilts and the sky swirls into oblivion. One, long, overwrought howl that is drowned out by the relentless growly of the beast before me.
And the the train is gone, and my screams fall away into ringing silence. Shivering in the rain, chest heaving, I sway. The gravel rends my knees as the slam into the ground.
In the distance, the long, low, pitiless wail of the train cries out against the storm.

I remember the day that this talks about, and I remember what it was like to feel so utterly helpless. It was roughly just after I had found out that I'd failed first year, and things were looking utterly bleak. What's interesting to me, I suppose, is that this was written almost 8 months after the fact, at the start of what seemed to me like a very hope-giving relationship. My life is full of strange splits in reality. Leaving singlehood to enter coupledom, feeling hopeless and then feeling redemption. When I wrote this, I wrote not as someone who had moved on and was living a separate reality from that hopelessness, but as someone who was still rooted in it. Written early on in the second term of second year, it was a very quick downward spiral that nearly led me to failure once again.

Since finding God and choosing to follow Christ, my life has been systematically realigned. As one thing turns, so must others, until entire areas of my life are suddenly filled with new light and hope. The prospect of relationships, singleness, and marriage are a very obvious example, and many people know I'm very outspoken now about how good God is in his design for our relational lives. So much has changed internally that reading this made me very aware of another split in reality. I lived that experience, and yet it seems so foreign to me now. I feel like I'm observing myself from a distance. I've only had one similar experience since becoming a believer, where I could feel futility 'wrapping cold fingers around me', but even then, it was a different encounter, because I became very aware of the Holy Spirit, leading and counseling me.

I was doing something I knew I shouldn't. I had striven so hard to avoid this situation, and yet here I was, finding myself in the same position, submitted to my own desires, like a slave. I knew it, and yet I continued. And as I continued, grief mingling with the promise of release, I was aware of something. Someone, I suppose, egging me on, telling me to continue, coaxing and pleading, nudging me forward. At the same time, a quiet, steady voice broke through, telling me I could still turn back, that this didn't have to be my life, my reality. To me, it seemed too late. The first voice grew stronger and more insistent and as release welled up and spilled over, my joy and relief gave way to horror as the voice cried out in victory and began feeding from my sin as a wild animal tears into a fresh kill. I'd failed again, and the enemy was delighted. Exhausted and shamed, the quiet voice found an audience in me. It told me that this wasn't permanent, and that if I trusted, I knew I could be forgiven, and that I could move on. I was still loved. Wiping my tears, stood up and walked away. I'm still walking.

Thinking about it now, it's amazing, the stillness and calmness that the second voice brought, and how simple it was to slip out of that first reality into the second, of a life spend following Jesus. No fog of confusion, no widening pit of emptiness inside. Just a simple choice to walk away and focus on Jesus. We're not guaranteed a perfect life, but we are guaranteed grace. I'm still amazed that people find my story, well, amazing. It's seemed like such a natural process, albeit a very hard one at times. I'm just thankful now that I have the option to choose, rather than feel helpless.

Something else to be thankful for, I guess.