stolen by grace.

I'm done. Exhale.

I handed in my last final this morning, emailed a set of summer plans to my professor, and the official end of my first-year of graduate school is here. I am free.

All I can think is-- I moved here for one thing, and got something entirely different. And I am grateful, and I am overwhelmed, and I am...well, I'm changed.

You know in the movies when something fabulous happens, and the girl gets up and spins around and around in such ecstatic joy that you can just see it shimmering off of her? (That does happen in the movies, right?) That's how I feel. Like I could spin around and around, shimmering and glad-hearted, and stolen by grace.

I feel as though I talk too often of how surprised I am to be where I am. Of how startled I am to see this life I have. But I think I like to remember it, because the contrast makes me joyful. I don't look back with melancholy or missing, but because I want to marvel. I want to plop myself down in His love, and say, "Look, Father, You did this, and this, and this, and oh my You, look at what you did with this!"

That's silly, I guess. I sound un-knowing. Fanciful. Naive.

I like it. I have spent a lot of time pretending to be all-knowing, and it had made me cynical. Jaded. I had become afraid (I am afraid) to delight, and to discover. Maybe, of all the gifts He has given me, this is the greatest:

That I would give up the control I never had, and learn at last to trust in the one thing I always had.