eat, pray, love.

I love to occupy the mind while going through my to do list. Usually I carry the laptop around with me and listen to music, watch a movie or catch up on sermons missed. Today I sit in my green sewing room and stitch by stitch I am creating a beautiful quilt for a wedding present. The noise in the background is Eat, Pray, Love. I read the book one summer while lounging by the pool but didn't get a chance to catch the movie when it recently fell somewhat flat in the theaters. Everyone I have talked to about it said – I didn't like it, it was boring, or the most popular why did she have to leave her husband to find life...

And I feel the same about the last response. I am sitting here listening to the dialog and occasionally watching the screen and I find myself wondering how she did it. How this independent, courageous and selfish woman left everything she knew in a search to find herself. There is a part of me that says it is foolishness. Why leave all that you have crafted and hoped for, all that you have built and worked towards to “find yourself” why waste all that time and energy to start over again, why do we build only to destroy?

There is another part of me that gets it. I feel the desire she explains when longing for something more than the box she has created for herself. I get the reckless abandon that it takes to walk away from our American Dream in pursuit of real life. I ache with the need to explore, to create, to grow and to really live. Don't you feel it? Are you who you want to be? Is that something that is even attainable? Are we supposed to, as Christians, ever be satisfied on this earth? Where is the happy medium that leaves us feeling successful and alive but also leaves us longing for what is next?

What does it make you feel? Do you start to ask big questions about what you have created and then figure out solutions to overcome the ways you have settled? Do you rest in the contentment of you life without a longing or desire to see it change? Do you run away from the adventure of the hunt to find our who you really are? What does it look like to embrace the life you have and then find who you are in the arms that surround you?