I didn’t want to go to church this morning. I woke up to my phone under me and my Bible still open next to my pillow and my first conscious thought was that I didn’t want to go to church. But it’s really not an option, so I got up and got dressed and I like to think that I was quiet, and for once it was her alarm that woke The Roommate up, not my scuffling around the room. I brushed my hair and putting my little notebook in my purse, wrapped a scarf around my neck, pulled on my coat, and went downstairs. And I went to church.
But the feeling I woke up to settled stronger in my heart and I stepped fast down the sidewalk to the train stop and I suddenly realize that I’m scared.
Because I’m three blocks from Michigan Avenue but who’s going to be out at 9am on a Sunday morning? I can count the people I pass from school to the train on one hand. Because someone’s discarded Starbucks cup rolls back and forth in the wind, the spilled contents splashed dirty brown on the already filthy piles of snow. Because the train’s underground and the urine smell is strong today and I’ve never noticed how much garbage lies heaped down there on the tracks.
And yesterday on the train back from a lunch date with The Roommate, I sat at one end of the train car and halfway back to school this train car full of people headed deeper into downtown for an enjoyable Saturday afternoon is struck silent by one man in the corner. I looked at him, I listened to him, but he dropped to his knees as telling became pleading and it seems so ludicrous that I took time to think that it’s illegal to solicit on the CTA. But he’s not soliciting anything, he’s absolutely begging and he says he can’t go on living the way he is, and my cheeks are prickling with emotion I can’t name and I got off the train with my head down and carried my shame all the way back to school, where I put my sweatpants on and crawled into bed.
And I was so relieved to be back in the safe nest of my bed, my room, my dorm, my school.
But The Roommate texts me not two hours later because a freshman from this school, a young man whose sister lived just around the corner last year, has died. And Moody was never a perfect place, never a safe haven, but any illusions that I had come crashing down and I’m frozen in my bed with my computer on my lap, mechanically typing out a paper, but I can hear sobbing in the hallway and the same prickling crawls up my face and suffering is so uncomfortably close.
And I woke up this morning and my first thought was to stay here. I didn’t want to ride the train because you know who else rides the train? Broken people who need Jesus. Broken people who fall to their knees and beg because they can’t keep living this way. And I balked at the dirty in the streets and the dark selfishness of my own heart, the black terror of distrusting Christ, is something I’ll never be able to hide from.
And I don’t have answers and I wished last night that I was little again, when I had much more faith in the world, and much less exposure to the raw pain of a broken earth.
And there’s so very much that I don’t understand, and the human, selfish desire to hide from the fresh, broken, utterly uncomfortable pain that rubs raw everywhere that I turn is so strong. But I think somewhere I’ve heard a command that I trust Christ, and I’ve read before that His grace is sufficient, and I have to believe that He has a plan in everything.
And I hold to trusting Him, because if I don’t, well then, there’s really no reason to leave this dorm.
~Natalia
