Angela At-Large

Tag: faith

  • to rest

    Today, like all days
    there’s a hundred thousand things to do…
    but my body, mind, and soul are desperate
    for a day of respite
    in the arms of a perfect God–
    sufficient in Himself
    with no need for me
      to fill Him
      complete Him
      satisfy or
      cater to Him;
    Who only says //Come, rest awhile with Me.//

    This hammock the cradle
    of His arms around me
    letting me
    just be me–
       not trying, not striving
       not hustling, nor denying
    the needed time to lie down
    in green pastures
    for the very Maker of my bones
      to restore my soul.

  • “Where are you?”

    It is the very first question God posed to Adam in the Garden as he walked there in the cool of the day. The question is explored in the second chapter of A Curious Faith by Lore Ferguson Wilbert, which was recommended to me several months ago by a dear friend. In the opening pages, Wilbert highlights how we are all born into a place, a culture, a time in history. We are born into a family, we live and work, we form and are being formed by the places in which we find ourselves. She poses the idea that before we can really know who we are, we first need to know where we are.

    So…where am I? Logistically, it’s quite simple: I’m in Indiana, house sitting for some friends. But like many things in life, the real answer, the deeper answer, is far more nuanced than what’s on the surface.

    Flip back through the calendar, and two months ago I was still living in upstate New York, transitioning out of an unfulfilling, unsuitable-for-me job and letting myself dream about who I might like to be in the world now. Flip forward in the planner, and in a few weeks my friends will return and I will shift into the next phase of the reasons I moved back to Indiana.

    Widen the scope even more, and the place and age I occupy on this planet becomes more complex. Complex, like flavor notes in a good coffee or wine – – not complicated like the knots of Christmas tree lights that must be untangled no matter how nicely you put them away the year before.

    I was born into two cultures, not one. And although the American part of me is the more dominant of the two, I cannot separate from or be who I am without the Filipino part of me. My last name only goes back one generation due to my dad being adopted; the bloodline may stretch back into parts of western Europe, but I belong to the family who gave us this new name. I also carry my mother’s maiden name, the sound of which echoes the era of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines–yet the DNA ancestry kit unveils the “99% Southeast Asian, Malay, Filipino” lineage that also courses through my veins.

    My childhood was tied to this Midwestern plain, but my entire adult life has been spent on planes, trains, and automobiles: Going to college in New York, moving overseas to teach English, traveling wherever my savings and time off would let me, returning to New York, hiking and cycling all over the Northeast…it is admittedly quite an adjustment to be back in the land that raised me. Even so, it is only a home base; a jumping off point for the places my van will take me as I develop the dreams I have had on my heart for so long.

    So where am I? I guess it comes back to being ever “at-large.” But for now, this is my where. This is me.