How Uncertainty Can Be Poetry

 In order of importance, I have found these three things to be of most help when I find my circumstances too much for me to handle: My relationship with Jesus and His Word, my family and friends, poetry. 

 I have been writing a lot of poems, lately.

I wrote a lot of poetry my senior year of high school, too. I wrote more poems than I knew were in me. It was a hard year full of loneliness and uncertainty as I waited longer than most students do to find out if I could go to the one school that held all of my hopes and dreams for the future. 

 I wrote about the waiting, the fears, the desires. I wrote about how much I wanted to go to this school, but how I feared the one thousand miles that would separate me from my family. I wrote about being excited for my future and at the same time mourning the childhood that I knew was about to end. I scribbled on notebook paper many poems about the uncertainty of our finances, how to live in-between hope and reality. How to survive a year of not knowing if I would get my dream come true or if I would have to make a Plan B. 

 My poems were an outlet for my thoughts, a way to remember the end of my childhood, and mostly, each poem was a prayer of surrender to God. 

 I had forgotten about that year of uncertainty and those poems.

 Until recently when I have felt like I am again re-living that year, just in new ways.

March

They said

in March

I would know. 

In March

I would know

how to cry.

These tears 

are not from joy or sorrow

but from the strange winds March blows.

One day

the breeze blowing on my neck is warm,

and my faith in going to Cornerstone is strong.

The next day,

I can feel the wind relentlessly tugging me, taunting me,

"You will never have enough money."

They said 

in March

I would know.

All I know

is my confusion

with March winds.

My poetry hasn't improved much since I was eighteen, and I suddenly find myself in a similar situation. 

 So I am reading my poems I wrote during my senior year of high school. And I am learning. 

 I am learning that as hard as it was to be so uncertain about college that year, I had forgotten. Each situation will pass with time, which will then bring new challenges. The world keeps spinning. 

 I am learning that God was faithful five years ago, and he will be faithful now. 

 I am learning over and over again about how weak I am and strong my Savior is. 

 I am learning how uncertainty is a struggle that I can choose to dwell in or I can offer to God, and He turns my uncertainty into poetry. 

 I do not know yet how I will cry, if I will cry from happiness or sorrow. I know I will cry either way. But I know that this too shall pass and that I follow Jesus who has already given me far more abundantly than I could ever ask.