From a Season of Pain, to a Season of Rest, of Wait.

Hello, friend. Again, it's been months since my fingers have typed steadily away at a post here. It's amazing how getting married will suddenly make you twice as hurried and busied in life, even if other responsibilities decrease along the way.

For two years, I've been in a season of pain. Beautiful things have happened along the way, but there has still been so much pain. The past two months have been essentially pain-free, and something has felt strange and so unfamiliar about it. It finally hit me this past weekend that my place of pain has been such a long walk that I'm not sure what to do without it. My understanding of my life and my walk with God were so spurred on and shaped through pain that without that pain in my life, I'm not completely sure what to make of my life and my walk now that I'm in a place of calm and rejoicing. There's gotta be irony there, right? We spend our lives trying to avoid pain! Yet here I am, realizing that I'm not sure what to make of life without it.

Something like this happened three years ago, during the spring semester of my sophomore year of college. After trials throughout freshman year and intensified struggle in my sophomore fall term, spring came around and it was glorious. I was hooked on the song "Girl on Fire," because I felt like I was fully alive and finally walking in a place of peace, living life fully! Trials had passed, life was greener than before, nearly every morning I was having radical and deep quiet times. God changed me through that season of rest and peace in amazing ways. Although beautiful things are birthed in places of pain, places of calm let us walk out in them in new ways. That fall God birthed identity in me, as my foundation was ripped away. What a poor "foundation" it actually was! Like the parable of the house built on the sand, many pieces of my life were built on unstable ground and God let earthquakes come into my life to disrupt that. The fall destroyed my faulty foundation and rooted me on Him in a new way, and in the spring I had a season of peace as I lived that out. As I said, that spring was glorious. I learned how to share my faith both with a diagram and through stories, I discipled a young believer who became a close friend and is now radically passionate for Jesus, I walked out in leadership in new ways, I actually got great grades (a struggle for me - but that's another story)!

That spring let me explore my new foundation, and in the following fall term, another season of trials came.

And stuck.

Life imploded around me. First, joy was impossible to find. (Ironically, joy seemed to depart from me within a few weeks of getting my tattoo, which reads "joy is strength." I wonder if Jesus ever chuckles at that in His loving, understanding way.) I had a week respite in October, and then anxiety descended. I stayed buried under that through Christmas and well on through half of the following summer. A month of respite, and then it crashed again through the next fall. Illness descended that fall; I spent at least 10 weeks sick during that semester. My immune system had had enough of the stress and simply crashed. I never caught anything "serious," but I did catch every stomach bug and cold that went floating around. I was anxious about everything, desperate for rest. 2015 brought with it new conflict as Nathan and I walked through the season of engagement and into newlywed status, and my anxiety tagged along through a lot of it. This past fall trauma befell our small group and I was left teary-eyed, crying silently before falling asleep the first few weeks afterward as I processed, and then struggled with a new battle against anger and bitterness, one deeper than I've ever encountered before.

Man, life can really take you through a lot, can't it? And that was just college.

Trials reveal what we believe about God, make us desperate for Him, and birth beautiful things.

Thank you, beautiful book on suffering, for teaching me how to suffer and what suffering means when walking with Jesus. Thank you, breakout session leader, for speaking about hope through trials and the honesty and beauty of pain and life. But more than that - thank you God for putting those things in my life.

So, honestly, none of this was originally meant to be part of this post. But it felt important to my story and what I'm processing now.

Oh, now.

Now is a season of rest, a season of calm, a season where laughter flows freely and joy abounds, where - for now - Nathan and I are walking through relatively little conflict and we laugh together nearly every day. And it's a season of waiting.

When you've been in a season of pain, a season of calm is wonderful! And yet it can also be foreign. My extended season of pain brought desperation for Jesus, a willingness to do anything and everything to be close to Him, even crazy things like fasting. (Just don't fast on mornings where you have a kinesiology class, or you'll run to the bathroom halfway through a set of 10 intense sprints, nearly throwing up. Apologies to the kinesiology instructor that I thoroughly scared when that happened.) I was so desperate to be close to Him that fasting was the best thing I knew how to do. I have trouble talking about fasting because I believe so strongly in doing it quietly, but I just want to illustrate my desperation. Desperate for Him enough that I denied myself food for a day, sometimes as often as once a week, just so that I could draw close to Him in prayer and long for Him in spiritual hunger through my physical hunger. When we're in pain, we are crazy people! At least, I am. Now, in a season of rest and calm, a piece of myself, albeit crazy, is back to the background of life and a freer version of myself is coming forth. And this part of me feels like a stranger. It's been so long since I laughed freely that at times I catch myself halfway through and wonder, "is that what my laughter has always sounded like?"

After a season of pain, this season of freedom and rest is incredible. And almost unreal. But I'm ready for it, so glad to finally be here. It's been a long 5 semesters of pain. (I'm told that even though I've graduated, while I live in a college town, life will always revolve in semesters. So far, so true.) I'm ready for a semester of calm, of rest. I don't know what that looks like, or fully how to walk in it. I don't remember the steps I took during the season of rest my sophomore year. Through my pain, Jesus has birthed beautiful things, and I'm ready to walk in them. I'm ready for the joy to abound even more than it already has. I'm ready to practice my new role of wife further. I'm excited for the dreams coming forth in me that God planted and is now faithfully watering - dreams about where Nathan and I might go one day, dreams about future adoptions (although those have been in me since I was 14, they are coming forth even more boldly now), dreams about learning even better how to tell stories of my life and what Jesus has done, dreams about writing a book one day, tending a garden, having two dogs and a cat, living life fully, walking in the Kingdom God has already brought here, though not in full just yet. I'm learning to take each day step by step, and live in the present. That sounds so contradictory to dreams, yet they go perfectly together. We must not live in the future, for as C.S. Lewis wrote well, the present is where we truly begin to get glimpses of eternity. Yet God plants beautiful dreams in us and it's so, so good to dream. Dream I shall, with myself and with my husband, yet live each moment as well engaged with the present as possible, to live fully engaged with others around me, engaged with the book I'm in (actually, like, 5 of them, which is 100% on par with my bibliophile tendencies), engaged in my Old Testament class, engaged in my Perspectives class. Engaged fully in the season of calm and of rest, regardless of my initial confusion over how to live that, and what that looks like.

It's a season of wait as well.

Do we really know how to live seasons of wait well? Probably not. Two dear friends of mine are in a big season of wait, a season of listening to God's timing on going forth into marriage. That's a hard season of wait! My season of wait is one of waiting for my next task. I'm done with college, and waiting for the next opportunity that I'm walking toward to come to fruition. After spending 4.5 years in college working hard to have this well-earned degree, it's a walk of humility to live in a season of wait, without a job, processing where I'm going in my future. I'll write on that later, when everything is official, but waiting until June is so hard. I feel useless right now. Not always. But the attacks come sometimes. It feels pointless to wait. Yet that's only the enemy whispering lies. More often than not, our lives are lives of one season of waiting or another. It's not always a season mainly comprised of waiting, like mine, but usually we're waiting on something, somewhere. I'm learning how to walk through that well. To defeat the lie that waiting is pointless, to rest in the truth that God works mighty things through seasons of waiting. In seasons of waiting it's so easy to take additional things on to escape our discomfort. Man, if there's anything I've learned recently, it's that our culture has particular difficulty in times of wait and rest. We don't know how to wait! We want everything nowwwww. (Hear the whine there?) We don't know how to rest! We get unsettled and uncomfortable with the idea of taking life at less that full speed ahead, and straight on to morning. I don't want a busied life. I want a joyful and flourishing life. The flower isn't hurried to bloom, so why am I hurried to flourish? I am uncomfortable without a job. Especially as I've come from the Engineering department, it brings a lot of shame not to have a job. Knowing statistics like "every graduate has 2.4 job offers upon graduation" that the department likes to proudly boast do nothing but heap shame on me, the girl who remained in this humble college town with her husband, knowing it could (and did) cost her a job.

I want to wait well, fighting against the shame and awkwardness of "wait" and "rest" in our culture.

Anyway, I don't want to begin rambling, and if anyone is still reading this - wow! You do love me! Okay, not really, but y'know, it's a good feeling for my heart that's timid to put this out there for others to read.

Whatever season you're in, it's a good season to be in. Good doesn't invalidate that it can be hard and full of suffering. "Good" and "suffering" are NOT the same thing (more like opposites), but they often walk hand-in-hand through our various seasons. My suffering included good things. I got engaged. I got married. I developed a deeper passion to reach the lost and deeper convictions on how to "adult." Don't let the "bad" invalidate the "good," and don't let the desire for "good" encourage you not to embrace the pain. If you reject the pain, you reject everything. If you reject the rest, you loose yourself to business.

Okay, for real though, I'm done.

With grace and love,
Cassian