patriciamalay

Wonder-full

My favorite word in the English language has always been “wonderful”. I decided on this during college, over a pseudo-intellectual conversation with another pseudo-intellectual friend. We were so full of ourselves, thinking us much better than others just because we listened to obscure music and didn’t do mainstream things. Instead we spent days talking about books and religion and our dreams. There were so many dreams to talk about.

Oh, but non-conformity is still conformity.

Anyway.

I just realized, I fall in love more with this word every day. I find something “wonderful” about each day… usually the sky, weather, the moon, the perfect bite. I find wonder everywhere. In people, where I go, in what I see and think and hear. I am amazed and blown away all the time by how wondrous everything is and how little of the reality I actually comprehend and if my human mind could contain all of it I might just burst into a million tiny pieces.

What I’m getting at is this: my heart will never be broken again. It hit me tonight. I’ve been walking around the past six years with my heart under lock and key and my arms all around it, really. I haven’t the inclination to give it away in total just yet. Unlike some women friends who I’ve witnessed go through relationships, I thought myself better that I had been sparing myself from the unnecessary trauma. Who needed the drama anyway? Of course, I realize this mindset that I thought kept me from hurt was hurting me this whole time. How does one protect a heart from sadness anyway without protecting it from joy, too?

But if my heart was always finding things to wonder at, if my eyes always marveled at the world around me, if my spirit could find joy in the big and majestic and tiny and mundane, how then will this heart ever experience sadness?

I get it now. I totally get it. This is what it means to fully surrender, to want nothing more, to be in the center of God’s purpose. There is peace here, where I am. No struggle, no pain, no striving. Just complete and mindblowing assurance that God has me. He has me in the palm of His hand. So all these fears, these doubts, these terrors I have over what-could-be’s and hope-I-never’s.. well, they kind of just fall by the wayside, pushed over by the beautiful reality that this big God I serve loves me so much that there is always something to be grateful for.

This. All of this. This is wonderful. And I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Not even the future I dream about compares to the faith that is building up today. A faith like I’ve never known before—the kind that can’t wait to be screamed about but is happy being quiet and still and content and completely and truly satisfied.