Great Expectations

Tomorrow I leave for a charming, Atlantic coastal house on the shores of Prince Edward Island to work on my life’s dreams. It’’s an Angela Ritchie ACE (arts, culture and education) camp being hosted by a longtime creative hero of mine, Sabrina Ward Harrison (whose work I was first introduced to by my dear friend Avital.) I’’ve been reading Anne of Green Gables in preparation, and between that and reopening Sabrina’’s book Spilling Open, I am being confronted with an abandoned way of living — Anne’’s insatiable desire for all things romantic and Sabrina’’s altogether raw confession.

Yesterday I was talking with my friend Sara and trying to explain how I felt about this trip. With my tongue uncharacteristically tied in knots, I finally spilled the truth that I was feeling NERVOUS.

I am nervous to go to camp.

Like the nervousness I felt before going to a Calvinettes camp-out when I was eight. Except today it’’s an adult nervous. Like I’’m fooling myself into believing that I can see all of the potential potholes ahead.

I’’m not nervous the girls are going to tease me or the boys won’’t think I’’m pretty. I’’m not worried I’’ll forget to bring my bathing suit or that it will rain all week and we won’’t be able to sing or roast marshmallows around the campfire. I’’m worried that this trip, this camp, this first four-day sojourn without my one-year-old, this meeting of a creative hero, this writing assignment, won’’t be all I desperately hope it will be.

Something deep, DEEP, in me wants to fling myself into this week with the unhindered expectation of a five-year-old. I want to believe with my twenty-year-old-heart (the better, freer, lighter heart) that this will be IT. The marker. The moment. The chapter changer. A time so affecting that I’ll hold it up as my Everest climb. A culmination of so so so much. And something (SOMEONE) tells me it is. And I want to believe it.

Oh god, do I want to believe it.

But my adult self tells me to be careful. To not care too much. To not get too excited. To set my expectations just a little bit lower.

And my five-year-old/twenty-year-old self is telling my thirty-one-year-old head/heart to fuck-off. To ““do what you did at first”” (Revelation 2:5). To BELIEVE.

That my God (the God I am so unsure of, the God who ever clings to me, the God of my youth, the God of the universe) is love. And that he WANTS me to believe this with every single inch of my being. And to not hold back.

And somewhere behind my ribcage, behind my separating bones, screams YES.

The yes of my two-year-old, five-year-old, twenty-year-old, pre-period, pre-heart-smash, pre-confusing-years, pre-church-mess-ups, pre-career-detours, pre-falling-out, pre-self.

Yes.

Yes. It will be.

Yes. I believe it.

Yes. There is love ahead.

Yes. There is more.

Yes. The daring will be worthwhile.

yes. yes. yes.

good. good. good.

love. love. love.

amen. amen. amen.

echoes my thirty-one-year-old heart.

And tomorrow I leave on a jet plane. And all shall be well. And all shall be well. And all manner of things will be well.

Yes. Amen. Let it be.