“And so my prayer is…

“And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn’t it?

It might be time for you to go. It might be time to change, to shine out.

I want to repeat one word for you:
Leave.

Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn’t it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don’t worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed.”

-Donald Miller

A friend posted this on her Facebook today. I remember reading this last year when I was in India. It is from Donald Miller’s book “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.” I think it is beautiful and comes at a time when I really needed to hear it.

That where I am right now is far away from many of the people I love, the places I have known.

Yet I am here. Yet this is part of my story. I sit in this living room in Kolkata, India, creating a story. This life that I am living is a story, and I want it to be all that it can be. I want to actively live to create my story, to move into all that God has for me, to learn to love and to create and to live the best story that I can.

I want to be able to go back to what I know having experienced the beauty of the unknown, having experienced what it looks like to be a part of a bigger story, to work for something bigger than myself. To hope for something more, to work for something more, to work for our hopes and dreams of what this world should look like to be a reality.