wandering (pt 1)

"where are you going?"

"oh nowhere; just wandering"

"can i help you with something?"

"no thanks; i'm just wandering."

a week ago exactly, i turned nineteen. two weeks ago (minus a couple days, but who's counting?) i got a driver's license. a month ago, i was employed by child evangelism fellowship, wrapping up my last few days as a summer intern. five months ago, i was leaving cef headquarters, a cmi graduate. nine months ago, i was leaving home for cmi.

so much has happened in the past year. i'm in the process of changing churches. i'm trying to find a job. a couple friends and i are thinking about moving out once we're all on our feet, which will hopefully not be long. and here i sit. just wandering.

all throughout my adolescent years, there were milestones. i went to zambia, and god opened my heart to missions. i went to china, and god opened my heart for those who've never heard. he told me to go to romania, and i did, and it was amazing, if not in quite the way i expected. god led me to cmi, and back home, and to a summer intership with cef...

and now i'm just...lost. wandering through the beginning stages of adulthood, trying to remember all the pieces of advice that were given me, trying to remember how exactly i've seen people do this thing called life, trying to figure out where i'm supposed to be. and i'm waiting. waiting for a sign from heaven, i suppose, a disembodied finger to float down from above and write my instructions in angular english, tilted and supernatural, on a wall. i'm waiting for something to happen, something that will confirm what i'm supposed to do.

earlier this year, while at cyia, i felt that god was leading me to move four hours east to another city. i was going to be an intern there, and work within the cef framework, with the eventual aim of...well, i still wasn't sure, but it involved overseas service with cef and possibly directorships and teacher training gigs and being somebody who went and did things instead of just sitting still and waiting for life to run into her.

well, that whole plan fell through, as my own plans so often do. i didn't feel peace about it at first, and then other things happened, things that had been festering for a long while, things that could have called my entire ministry into question, through nothing i'd actually done. i had to do hard things and say hard things and generally be pretty damn ruthless and it hurt. i had to give up dreams of a future i'd been holding close for a long time, a future equal parts hopeless and beautiful, a future i would have gladly given much up for. a future that i'd already partly given up, because i knew there was no future in it at the beginning of this year. a future i'd been hanging onto with both hands, trying to preserve.

but i gave it up, because i had to.

and now i'm sitting here, at the cusp of, like, real adulthood, and i'm staring at all these other twenty-somethings who are bumbling through life, searching for the free food and the job that will Make Them Something, and i realize i'm just another cog in a dysfunctional machine that's slowly spinning into the sun, into an uncertain universal doom that will eventually claim all men, launching us off into eternity, into the hands of a loving god or a perfect judge.

and that's sort of depressing. and i'm still no closer to figuring out what the heck i'm going to do. maybe i'll end up just wandering through life. i hope not.

- Kyla Denae

all the little things

i miss the little things about far off places

i miss the oranges in the african sunset

i miss the clack of chopsticks

i miss the smell of rain against a backdrop of cooking rice

i miss the lilt of words i can't understand

i miss different foods

i miss conversations that are missing half the words but nobody cares

i miss singing in gypsy

i miss getting to meet new missionaries

i miss learning about other cultures from the people that are in them

i miss that swing in the johnson's backyard

i miss exciting children's parks

i miss strange grocery stores

i miss not knowing anyone

i miss stumbling over words and having toddlers giggle at me

i miss walking everywhere i go

i miss simplicity

i miss dusky little faces and white teeth

i miss sitting across a room from a bunch of people and just grinning

i miss getting up early and reading my bible to an african sunrise

i miss the mysterious red moving guy from the xi'an expo

i miss dancing with three hundred chinese students

i miss eleven o'clock roommate sessions

i miss so many little, tiny things that don't seem like much, but that hurt me when i think of them.

and i want them back.

i want to stop missing them.

i want to go places, to see people and things i've never dreamed of before.

but i'm going to stay here anyway.

because for right now, this is where i need to be.

and i know i keep bugging you people with this same thing

but it hasn't ceased to be true.

and i'm happy here

and i love the people here

and i love the ministry i have here.

god is blessing it greatly, more and more everyday.

but god.

so i'll keep on missing it

and eventually it'll happen.

and i'll be even happier than i am.

- Kyla Denae

of hobbits and a revolution

Today I realized that The Hobbit comes out in fifty days. Now, that may not seem like an incredible happening to some of you, but I'm pretty excited. I've been waiting a long time for a rendition of Tolkien's smaller (and arguably less serious) book. I've never liked it quite as much as I liked Lord of the Rings, but I'm always up for another, fresh journey to Middle Earth, no matter who's taking me.

The film edition of Les Miserables (with Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman) comes out a couple weeks later, and my mom has promised to take me to see it (mostly because she didn't manage to get me over to our hometown's small theatre company's production of it). I'm quite excited about that one, too.

I read Les Miserables earlier this year, and adored it, utterly and completely. As I told a friend last night, it just gives me a lot of literary feelings. It has everything I love--religion, history, romance, adventure, believable character arcs, beautiful people, horrible people, and a little bit of the in between. It deals with the story of a character that I firmly believe is one of the most amazing to ever grace literature, an opinion that may change (but I really hope not, because I really love Jean Valjean)--a character that changes so beautifully, whose inner thoughts are so wonderfully illuminated through the events of his story--and it has another, albeit minor, character that is so wonderfully, purely Christian that it makes me smile just to think of it.

So I'm excited about that movie, too. Because I can't wait to see it, to see one of my favorite stories brought to life. Of course, that comes with the added clause that, if it stinks, I reserve full right to be very angry and rant to everyone I can about how horrible it was. But that's a whole other issue.

For now, I'm excited, for quite shallow reasons, about the next few months.

- Kyla Denae

my feels will never be whole again

because of a television show.

The Doctor Who mid-season finale was this evening. And Amy and Rory Pond.
and the Doctor
and
and
my emotions.

I think I may never recover.

so if you see a skinny auburn-headed girl wandering the world someday, and ask her why it is that she can't speak above a whisper and why she is constantly crying, and why exactly it is that she's clutching a battered old sonic screwdriver to her chest

I will tell you now what she would say.

because the Doctor my poor baby 
he had a family and he lost it

again

Steven Moffat is cruel

that is all

- Kyla Denae