Here am I

When I was twenty-two, I ran into a professor in an elevator who said, “Hey, I need someone to do research for me in London. Want to go?”

Going to London was a turning point in my life. I spent six weeks there, and it had undue effect on the person I became. Like, I’d refused to care about clothes or makeup or anything appearance related, because I’d subscribed to second wave feminism—but in London I was like, “There are exactly zero guys here I’m trying to impress, and I still want to know what I look like with eyeliner, so I’m gonna do it.” I’d always thought I didn’t like being outside, and one day, on the top of White Horse Hill with the wind whipping around me, I found out that I loved being outside. Not being around people I knew meant that I could become who I wanted without fighting their expectations, and it was glorious.

My first day in the UK, Trafalgar Square, June 2015. I’m second from the left, sitting with some lovely women whose names I no longer remember.

Not being around people I knew also meant that I was lonely. I had friends in London, but I hadn’t known them very long, and I was yearning for specific people. For Melody and Katie and Sinead and Jeremy. For mom and dad and Elle. I’d lie in bed at night and picture them at Provo parks eating watermelon or sitting on the rocking chairs at Waikiki listening to Hawaiian music, and I would ache to be there.

I started praying a lot. God was the only one I could get a hold of regularly that I’d known for more than three months, so I talked to him all the time. Talked is, actually, the wrong term here, because London is where I started writing down my prayers.

I’m not entirely sure how that started. It might have been that I got the idea from The Help, where Aibileen writes down her prayers. Or it might have been that, what with the jetlag and sharing an apartment with five other girls, writing was the only way I could focus. In any case, my notebook turned into a prayer book, and I took it with me everywhere—on the train, to the park, to class, to the library. I prayed lying on my narrow bunkbed, sprawled next to Princess Diana’s memorial, standing in line for play tickets. My written prayers poured over into thought prayers until, for the first time in my life, I was “praying always.” I prayed for the people I missed, I interrogated God on my future, I thought through theological questions. I prayed about everything.

I attribute a lot of the changes that went on that summer to these prayers. I allowed myself to be more adventurous, more friendly, more excited about life. The biggest change was that I wasn’t afraid. As a little girl, my parents tell me, I was almost never afraid. One of my dad’s favorite stories from my toddlerhood is watching me walk down our drive way and continue for four blocks, never looking back. I was bald, tiny, tan, and barely a year old.

I hadn’t been that tiny, unafraid soul in a long time. I’d allowed hurts to shrink me from that adventurous, barely born, bald baby into a twenty-something with severe fear. In London, in prayer, I was being healed. I was becoming more myself.

My dad holding me when I was tiny.

When I returned from London I started my masters. I walked in with a friend who was jittery. “Aren’t you anxious?” she asked. I paused, because I wasn’t. Historically, I’d been a reliably anxious person. If you were anxious, I was probably also anxious, and we could be anxious together. But I wasn’t that day. I felt calm as I went to start a new academic program and meet the people I was going to spend two yeas with. I trusted that it was all in God’s hands, and that His hands were much more trustworthy than mine.

There’s this scripture about fasting that I’ve been thinking about a lot this week. “Then you will call, and the LORD will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I” (Isaiah 58:9). That’s what I felt during that post-London time. I could call, and the Lord would answer.

It was a really good year to feel that way. It was my first time in graduate school, my first time teaching, my first time getting my heart broken. It was an intense little while, and I’m grateful that the whole way through God was there, making Himself known.

It’s been a long time since I felt that kind of immediacy with God. I have flashes and brushes with divinity, but my last couple of years hasn’t been made up with that kind of consistency. I heard this week that successful marriages are cyclical—they involve falling in love, disillusionment, and contentment, over and over again. This is what my relationships with God is like too. Sometimes I feel wrapped up in it, flushed with the knowledge of divinity. Later, I’m upset. I can’t believe He’d allow that to happen. I feel distant. Eventually, we reconcile, and I feel at ease, comforted, quietly joyful.

Since London, I’ve completed two masters, moved across the country, got married, and endured crippling bouts of depression. I’ve become a new creature, again and again. Talking to God is different now, because I’m different.

During my last bout with depression, I felt distant from God. I knew He was there, but I couldn’t feel Him with me, even when I desperately wanted to. Now, though, I’m ready to fall back in love. I know I can. I’ve been there before. As I push back into health, I can also climb back into connection with my God. I’m ready to find myself again by finding God—because one of the other things I learned in London is that I’m more myself, more that joyful, exploring, friendly little girl I used to be, when I’m with God. So I’m learning how to call so the Lord will answer and how to answer when He calls. I’m learning how to say with him, “Here am I.”

Me as a joyful, exploring, friendly little girl. I still remember loving that dress.