Bright and Scary.

I’ve been doing a lot of driving, usually up and down Memorial Drive, next to the Charles River, black like glass.

I’ve long told myself that I like to drive there because I love Boston, and this is me enjoying the city. But it’s really because I love water, and dark winding roads that are split by yellow lines, and tall, beautiful trees that cover the road and disappear into the sky.

In short, I love driving on Memorial Drive because it reminds me of where I grew up, not where I think I like to live.

I drove Memorial Drive again tonight, and it was a good drive. Usually, I drive because I’m conflicted, and I need my hands turning the wheel and the music going to help my brain calm down. The past two nights, I’ve driven because I’m free, and I need time to sit there and love it, and to tell God thank you even though I don’t know how I came to be at ease.

I have big decisions coming in my life, big choices that have to be made. I didn’t how to make them before, and I still don’t know how to make them now, but the difference between driving in angst and driving in freedom has been just a few nights, and some well-placed words from friends, and some pure grace from God. I have long sought and prayed, and it appears that this time the road’s bends are going to end a different way.

The crazy thing about tonight was that, when I left a friend’s home and took to the darkened streets, a thunderstorm was coming. I’ve always loved thunderstorms — we get really good ones up where I’m from in the Adirondacks, where the air is thick and hot and sticky and then suddenly starts popping out big, wet raindrops. It was like that tonight, and I put the windows down as the drops began to fall.

The best part about thunderstorms, though, is the lightning. When real lightning comes at night, oh so close, it lights up the entire sky. For that brief flashing second, everything is like day and perfectly clear. It’s awesome.

I drove toward home, but when I got there, I turned down Memorial Drive instead, slipping along the curves in the dark night with the raindrops falling. The lightning was striking, more often and more often, and the whole river was being lit up. My path down Memorial Drive was getting me closer and closer to the source, closer to where I could see the white arcing down, closer to where it could be really dangerous.

It was so bright, and so scary. It was just like the freedom I just found. In a minute, everything is so clear and you just want to run into it, but at the same time, you know you’re flirting with something that could go very badly very quickly.

But I had a different card in my deck tonight as I drove down Memorial Drive. When you’re driving toward lightning and you think to yourself that you wouldn’t mind if your car got hit or something, because you’d just find a way to repair it, that’s a good sign that you may finally have peace. And I do have peace. I’m driving toward lightning, and I have all the peace and wonder I’ve ever had when I was a kid or a carefree teenager or a person who knows she’s not bound by expectations or what she could lose.

The thunder is loud, and the lightning is outside now. My only wish is that I could get in my car and drive straight toward it, right away.

Testimony.

I was baptized Tuesday, May 21. Long story short, I was scared of putting my head under water when I was a kid, so I stalled on getting baptized, and then I didn't do it when I was older (and slightly less afraid of water) because I was embarrassed because I was older. I thought about it a lot, though, and decided that being obedient and getting a little wet was the least I could do for a really amazing God. This is the story I told at Ruggles Baptist Church on Tuesday, when my pastor from Reunion Christian Church baptized me.

I’m a writer, and I’ve always been a writer, and no matter what place I live or what job I have, that’s who I’m always going to be. I think, all the time, and I love to tell stories and talk things over with people. The way I see and understand the world is through the lens of words.

The reason I want you to know I am a writer is because that’s the simplest way I can tell my story. I could have brought any number of poems or lyrics or essays or novels up here, but there’s only one story I like to tell anymore. Rather than trying to describe my life and the hundreds of times God has done something in it, I want to tell you about Newbury Street, and darkness, and the place where I learned that it wasn’t a mistake that I turned out to be who I am.

I moved to Boston chasing dreams, like many people do, but in the grind and demands of life, things became very dark. I remember having been here for a few months and walking the streets, alone among crowds and staring up at what should have been beautiful buildings. Instead, my heart was heavy, and everything I had come here for — to share hope, to talk about Jesus, to show a lost and dying world that God made sense — that was all empty to me. I knew the truth; it set me free; so why was I wandering? Worse yet, nothing had meaning. Nothing could interest me. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t write, because I had nothing to write about.

I got in contact with an old professor of mine and told her I had no reason to write, and she and I talked in very academic terms about being “distanced from the source” and all these other big phrases that basically said that if God wasn’t real to me, nothing in life would be, either. That was nice to know, but it didn’t help. She then suggested she send me a chapter of a book she was writing called How Literature Helped Save My Soul. That is a fantastic title, so I agreed.

When the chapter arrived, I went to Newbury Street for my customary cup of coffee. The chapter was about Jane Eyre, and how this professor related to Jane Eyre, and how God had used Jane Eyre to teach this professor when she was a teenager that just because she was different and quirky and artsy and smart didn’t mean that she was in some way wrong, or that God had made a mistake. Instead, it meant something even better — that Jane could have a connection with God that few others could experience.

When I read that chapter, something inside of me died, and I was overwhelmed with a feeling that, despite being saved since I was five years old, I had never felt before. I remember writing in the margin of that printed-out chapter, my hand shaking, “God loves me.” God loves me. I wasn’t a mistake, and this wasn’t just something people had to tell me. God was telling me He loved me. For the first time in my life, I knew it was true.

Love isn’t the only thing I’ve discovered in this city. God has come and found me again and again, and He’s taught me that words like peace and joy have real meaning, too.

But the funniest thing that has happened since that day on Newbury Street has been that the professor didn’t heal me, persay. I still don’t write an awful lot. But that’s because, whenever I sit down with the guitar or the pen or the typewriter or the computer, I often find myself sitting there and just smiling at the wall like an idiot. How can you capture that? How can you put God into words? Sometimes you just need to let it all go free.

When we are no longer bound by the chains of who we think we have to be or the way we have always defined ourselves, Christ can become big in our lives.

Colossians 2:10 says, “You are complete in Christ.”

And if we are complete, then we can revel in 2 Corinthians 5, which tells us that, now that we know God’s love, hope, peace, and joy in a personal way, we can tell others what we’ve come to know so well ourselves: “Become friends with God. He’s already a friend of you.”

That’s what I want you to remember about this today.