My DC Experiment

A year ago this week, I moved to the Washington, DC area for three months.  Three months later, I moved to DC again, and here I still am.

(That's last year.  No cherry blossoms for a few more weeks!)

I originally came when a family friend recommended me for an internship, which led into a real job that practically applied for me, instead of me for it.  I had nowhere to live and wouldn't have come, if not for a friend in the area that I barely knew (at the time), who happened to know someone with an available and affordable room for rent.  My parents helped me pay for living expenses during the unpaid internship, and while the car I drive and the bed I sleep in belong to me, they were both gifts from some generous friends.


A few months in, when I was still in DC but needed a new place to live, God gave me a miraculous little house and some slightly wonderful roommates.  That's more of a story that I will tell another time, but I live in a little brick reminder of the fact that every part of my time in DC has been a gift.  My whole life is a gift from God, I know, and I don't want to make light of that, but it's been particularly obvious that my being here now is just one gift after another.  Each person and each place--it's almost funny how many doors the Lord opened that I didn't even know were there!  This is not at all what I expected to be doing this year, but it's great!

Yet sometimes I find myself wondering what I'm doing here, and why.  Wondering so hard that it wells up in my eyes and pours down my face--not because things are going badly, but simply because I do not know.  This isn't what I expected to do, so I can't see where it's going, and that scares me if I let it.

But God, my wonderful Father who loves me, reminds me of Himself.  He lets me look back at all of these gifts, at all the tiny threads He has woven together this far and I am amazed.  Only He knows how to weave our lives together, and I sit overwhelmed by how tiny I am in the fabric that's being made, and yet how specific He is in caring for me.

I look at my tiny little self in that picture He is making, in the one corner of it that I can see.  I feel like I don't know anything, and I really can't even do much, but isn't that good for me!  When I can see what I don't know, I'm quicker to see what He is doing.  Maybe you are not like this, but sometimes I get distracted by myself and need to be shocked back into the reality that I'm not that great.  Not in a self-deprecating or poor-me way, but truly recognizing that the best of me can't even begin to compare to the shadow of God's greatness.  And this is good!  He is truly, completely, nothing missing and always enough for me, and that makes me love my smallness, which lets me sink in and enjoy how much better God is than I would be.


And all of this came out of my one year anniversary with this city.  I used to think I might end up in DC one day, in some vague, far-off future thought.  I didn't know how long I would come or what I would do here or when, but suddenly, by no plan I made, DC is now in my present.  And it's still a little vague to me, but that's okay, because I couldn't have figured it out this far by myself anyway.  I would quite literally not be here now if I were on my own, but my God who knows how to guide and give so perfectly is with me, and He does not change.  In everything I don't know, He brings me back to things I do know, like this:

This I know, that God is for me.

In God, whose word I praise,

In the Lord, whose word I praise,

In God I have put my trust, I shall not be afraid (Psalm 56:9-11)