Peace and Love

The weather forecast for Denver, Colorado: a high of 45 and low of 19 today, partly cloudy; high of 21, low of 0 tomorrow, cold with light snow; and on Thursday, a high of 11 and a low of -8, "COLD!" according to the Denver Post. I think I've chosen the perfect time to leave.

Tomorrow's the big day. I'll fly to Detroit, hang out there for a few hours, then fly to Paris. I'll be staying at the Peace and Love Hostel in Paris for a few nights -- you can definitely expect a blog post or two about that place -- and then I'm off to Montpellier. Even once I get there, I'll still have over two weeks until classes start on the 25th. I plan on getting used to the new time zone, exploring the city a little bit, and maybe taking a short trip somewhere in France, perhaps to see my friend, Audrey, in Aix-en-Provence.

As you may be able to tell, I'm looking forward to the independence I'll have while abroad. I am going to be totally on my own, no one there to tell me where to go, when to go there. This is, imaginably, both exciting and scary. I will say, however, that when people have asked me over the past few weeks if I'm nervous or scared about this trip, my honest first reaction is to say no; I'm ready for an adventure.

And I shouldn't say that I'll have no one there to tell me where to go and when to go there, or at least to give me some sort of helping hand. I'm not journeying to the center of a desert or the depths of the Amazon; I will be surrounded with people nearly all the time. Granted, I won't know most of them, but even asking in French for help or directions from a stranger is a sort of adventure. What's more -- quite a bit more, in fact -- is that God is here with me as I type this, and He will be with me as I fly to Detroit, and as I take the train from the Charles de Gaulle airport to Paris, and as I talk with other travellers at the Peace and Love, and at literally every single moment of this trip. It's a tad funny that some people try to escape their pasts or find themselves or start totally anew by fleeing to a different country; I wonder if they realize that there is no escaping God, who does not change, not even when our messy lives move from one place to another. And, somewhat similar to my impending independence being a source of both excitement and fear, I think the ever-present nature of God can be both a comfort and a sort of burden. You can read Psalm 139 as the greatest of love letters or the most distressing of stalker notes. Just one day away from my departure, I am taking the assurance of God's closeness as absolute comfort.

I hope others realize that wherever they are, even if after Christmas and New Year's they find themselves in the same place they were before the holidays, that God is with them, ever with them. I have the fortune of facing great displacement in my life and therefore see with greater clarity than I usually do that hardly anything in life is constant, immovable. In a constantly moving world, we should cling to those constants -- or, I think more accurately, to the one Constant.