covered by grace.

I am wildly blessed.

And emotionally exhausted.

I moved this week, for the third time in seven months. I brought my roommate and her wedding dress to the airport today, and as I walked back through the terminal I got broadsided by a whole lot of something I don't understand.

I'll miss her, yes. But it was more than that. Thinking about who I was when I moved in with her, and who I am now, and about how I used to spurn this culture, and now I am feeling more at home in it, and about accepting Christ, and actually having Christian friends, and being willing to lay my life to the side to love Him, and the possibility of a future that is always marked by this time...

I cried all the way home.

And it felt weird. I felt like I was feeling with a part of my heart I hadn't known was there. The pain was different than any I've known. So with the joy. It was full. Somehow.

My heart is softer than it was. At first, it was softer because of the love I was shown by the people at James River. Now, it is not only their love that moves me, but His. Though I struggle to understand it.

In earnestness, I ask myself often, how do I love like these people? It's special, it really is. They deflect when I say this, but I have walked into and out of so many churches, and seldom felt the kind of love I feel from this church. For the first few weeks I attended, I didn't walk out of a service without a stranger giving me a phone number or email address. I remember after DFL feeling as though I had been cared for by strangers the entire time. Women asked me to eat with them, dragged me down the aisle to the "best" seats, introduced me to their friends. I felt so cared for. So loved.

I am changed by His love through them.

Maybe it's not fashionable, or particularly cool, or intellectual, or rational, to claim that. But I will because it's true.

Walking out of the airport, I cried because I'll miss my roommate. But also because I was one person, and that person was good, and fine, and smart. But now I'm this other person, and she is covered by grace. His, and theirs. She is redeemed.