Subtleties in the Weather (or Everyday Thing #2)

Weather is an odd thing: not only does it have its varying degrees of hots and colds, its different kinds of rains and winds, it also has a feel and a smell to it. One of the best examples is how it can smell like Halloween once October hits. There's something in the crisp air that mixes with falling leaves, the chilly breezes, and the hoodies that haven't been worn since March that mixes all together and makes a scent that is unique to Halloween. This happens in summer too. It can smell and feel like summer. In my hometown particularly, when the wind blows right, air rolls off the Salt Lake and there's a hint of salt in the wind that mixes with the smell of freshly cut grass and other inexplicable elements to combine to make the scent of summer.

Yesterday I noticed a different kind of nuance in the weather. It's been really nice outside for days and even a few weeks now. The temperature has been perfect: right in that area where you forget to check how hot it actually is because you don't notice the temperature at all. It's even gotten up to the upper 70s without it getting out of control hot. Yesterday, however, as I emerged from one of the buildings on campus, I immediately felt different. It wasn't incredibly hot, but it just felt different. The sun on my neck felt different, somehow. I said to my friend that it felt like a different kind of heat. She remarked that the spring heat is gone and the summer heat is here. "That's it!!" I said. It sounded crazy to both of us, but it makes sense. There's some little factor that's been changed so that it now feels like summer outside and no longer spring. It could be that the temperature just increased, but I think it's more than that. It feels like it's more than that. I could strangely smell something in the air that confirmed what we had just said and consequently basked in it for the rest of my walk back to work.

This is another instance where I ask myself, Am I crazy?

Someone to Talk To

It's been a while since I've posted anything on the blog....mostly because it's been a while since anything has really made me think "Gosh, I'd like to write a post about this" or "This would make a great blog post!" While all the things on this blog are personal, there are a lot of personal things and then personal things to sift through before I get to things I want to post. So while life has continued and things have happened since my last post, it wasn't until tonight that I had something that (I feel) is worth saying.

One of my basic needs that is personal to me is a need to be understood. It's often hard for me to talk to people about how I really feel, mostly when it's something hard in my life, because I know that they can't understand it. I know they want to help me more than anything, but because I know deep down that
they can't understand, they often can't do anything, so I just opt to not say anything at all.

Another piece of information that's important in order to understand the eventual point of this post is that I've always heard people say that they know they can always talk to God about everything and anything. Whatever it was, they could tell Him about it and somehow I imagined that everything turned out all right for them after saying that. I've always known that I could talk to God about anything, but I never really felt like I got answers. I know I had answers about several big decisions in my life, so I didn't doubt that He was there, but I wondered if He really did care about the small things in my life. Even in my hardest times, I never really felt any sort of comfort that people always talked about in their testimonies or stories. I never felt any sort of warm, loving feeling, no acceptance, no understanding.

I'm sure there were a number of factors that played into my feeling that way, but I'm not sure what they were and at this point I don't care. All I know is that things have changed. It's been so gradual that I didn't realize until tonight at around midnight as I was brushing my teeth how much I was looking forward to telling God about things that happened during my day, several of them uncomfortable things that I knew (don't ask me how) that only He would understand.

In the past few months, I've started really confiding in God. I mean really confiding. There comes a point in everyone's life when they truly have nobody to talk to. Sometimes, there simply is nobody I can talk to to make things better or easier, and certainly nobody who will understand. Happily, in my moments like that, I turned to God. I've laid things out on the table for Him, told Him that this is how things are and this is what's going on and this is how I feel. I've told Him that I am not sure how I ought to react or feel but this is how I am reacting and feeling. My prayers have been becoming less formulaic and more informal. I haven't been keeping back the "knitty gritty" stuff. Actually, when I talk to God, that "knitty gritty" stuff takes up a large portion of the conversation. Slowly, I've realized that God does understand. He understands and the best part is that He's okay with everything that I feel. And even better, because I know that He is OK with it, I am OK with it and am much less hard on myself for the little things that I keep inside to reproach myself with.

So at the end of the day (and the beginning of it), God is my go-to. He's given me people in my life that I can talk to when I need one kind of support or another, of course, but sometimes, there is just nobody but God that I feel comfortable talking to, nobody but Him who will understand. It's a relief to know that I don't have to preface how I feel with anything when I talk to God because He was there when it happened.

 It's really important to realize that this took a long time. I've also realized that this took a long time for probably every person who I ever heard say that they felt they could really talk to God and He understood them. I certainly haven't been there for all the times when they felt alone or wondered if God cared about the little things in their life. How can I expect to understand? I heard the end, or at least most recent, result of their experiences and I expected to get to that same point in a few days or fewer.

It's also important to realize that, even though God does understand and that brings me a lot of quiet comfort that can often go unnoticed, my problems do not go away as I expected and hoped when I heard people tell their stories. That wouldn't really make much sense. How on earth can I expect to overcome the problems if a few prayers and soulful confidence in God takes them away? No, because they are still present, that helps me remember my dependence on His constancy. And, while I still am not grateful for all the trials I have, I am grateful for the things that they have brought me, one of which is an answer to a long-asked question: Yes, God is there and He does care and (most of all for me) He does understand. That knowledge is something that is worth a lot to me and something that I hope I can always remember.