Christ-like cameo.

I can't sleep.

I'm thinking about the people I've met here. Most of them have no idea how they've touched my life, about how I think of them, and some ten-second segment or other of our interaction plays through my mind, reminding me of the great privilege it is to live alongside of them.

As I turn to leave a pastor's office, he says, "I know you want this, Ashley. It's clear where your heart is." Dinner with a mother and son, struggling through a place unknown, but filled with grace and humor. Someone looking through me, calling me out of shock tactics and fakery. A stranger willing to stand, freezing, outside of a coffee shop on the first night we'd met, stepping up to guide me, with incredible compassion.

The moments go on. A moment spent in prayer in a woman's home where prayer sustains. Another in an early-morning email from yet another stranger. On and on.

Makes me wonder about my own ten-second cameos?

I live a divided life. Christianity is so unpopular in academia, and my church so misconstrued in my peer group, that I am usually pretty quiet about all of it. Only those closest to me know that I go to church, and even they don't know how seriously I regard spiritual issues. That's such a pansy way of saying it. Even they don't know how much I love God, and what it means to me that Christ died for me.

I'm afraid that my moments in the minds of others are less than uplifting, less than insightful.

I pray for a couple of things consistently--the first is wisdom. The second is that His great and unfathomable love would settle inside of me, such that it spills out around me to anyone I meet.

His love is perfect. I am not. And so I keep trying to make the kinds of cameos that these people have made in me.