Being carried forward

What is the point of our months away from everything familiar in Orlando? I ponder the question often. As I look back over the past few years, I realize my core is being dismantled to make way for a truer version of myself.  My true self was for many years buried beneath a moral, robotic shell of a person, and has only recently begun to be exposed.

Marguerite lives on Green Dolphin Street, also the title of the book which I am devouring. She comes to a similar place in her life... "By whatever devious and humiliating steps she had come to this place, she had nevertheless come to the right place... She was at home.  A surge of joy went through her.  If the wind was tearing the golden fruit off the trim little trees in their tidy pots, it was, with perpetual sweep of its wings, burnishing the stars."

The course of my life is not as I had expected.   In my naiveté, I thought marriage would easy and blissful.  I thought I would mother four lovely, but uncomplicated children. I though I would live in monochromatic suburban America.  I thought happy homemaking would be the sum total of my existence.  My tidy pots are having their perfect little fruits torn off.

But like Marguerite, I will not find myself, find God by my own means.  "Even in sleep, even through the night, the vessel had been carried forward by no virtue of her own;  and God had been within it all the time."

South Head, Sydney Harbor

So why are we here in Australia? Why city life? Why the unfamiliar? So that our vessels can be carried forward, not on the paths we imagined, not in our own power, not to the destination we pictured.  My prayer is that God will reveal Himself to me through his mysterious power experienced in ways I've never known before, whether in the waves crashing on rocky cliffs, the smile of a child I did not expect, the slow curving of the calligraphy pen, or in a fresh reading of the Ultimate Story.