Overflow

I'm not sure how much I've learned in the month, almost two, that I've been back in Atlanta. I've come a long way from being a thinking man within a few short years. This is now simply this, not this and that. I've learned my yes ma'am's and no ma'am's, but I admit I still do find it hard to straighten that back, stand tall, and look you dead-on in the eye when you're talking to me. Just understand this: life continues to open up into a brilliance of complexity that I find inexhaustibly beautiful--ever reforming, ever renewing.

Even for almost forty thousand dollars a year, I still can't tell you much about marginal costs and optimal choices, about the ins and outs of this city, about the dozens of Chinese characters I cram inside my head every day, about what's on CNN, about girls, about loving and caring for people. But hell, I'd like to think I'm making progress.

I've been up and down the coast, back and across the country like a small piece on a game board. Many people have moved out of my life, but God has brought in many more. Circumstances continue to change with unreal fluidity, and I get the distant sense that I'm getting shunted into the limelight of my own life. Hard as I've tried to test the limits of God's grace, no matter how many mode and moods I've gone through, I'm still here blogging before you, lying on my front, resting in Christ. The peaks and the lows of my short history seem so unimportant and so cloudy and distant. I've been reckoning with love and bitterness, friendship and loneliness, and laughter and tears. And I know there is yet still so much to learn. I've written on my palm, "help me to feel the abundance of Your love and to pass it on others." I hope it doesn't wash off too quickly.

I can see out my window at the neighboring apartments, and whereas two minutes ago, where there were still a few lonely windows lighted, they've all clicked off by now. I still have scores of strands of broken thoughts and incomplete sentences stretching and sprawling through my mind, but I think it's time to be a man and call it quits. I recall something someone wrote in their blog a long time ago. I think it was Robin, and her words went like this: "and I am but the smallest of saints..." And so this I say: keep me in your prayers, as I would love to keep you in mine. I hope to talk to you all soon. This is one small saint signing out for tonight.