...while stuck at school during P/T interviews...

Life is at an uncomfortable level of familiarity and absurdity these days. Mundane and redundant, yet oddly unfamiliar. I sit in my "new classroom" surrounded by students and teachers whom I see daily, but whom I find myself not knowing and barely caring for. I am in a state of love-paralysis, comatose to the very fluid that fuels my existence.
At the same time, new life is springing out of every crack of predictability and I find myself in a strange garden with a familiar groundwork. Like Kids club where for 5 years worth of Mondays my life has lived out the same routine. Snack. Craft. Game. Lesson. Kids. Mess. Noise. Hope. Despair. Joy. Pain. Fatigue. Until just this week as new potential blossoms with new leadership from Angie. Suddenly Kids Club is not about me, and I discover that I am on my out, and life surges forward.
Having said all of this, I am rested and snug in a safe bed of the very love I find myself unable to dole out with the generous heapings I would want. I find myself protected and propelled by the love shining from the faces that surround me in life. And not only faces shining, but hearts beating and eyes blinking back tears and arms reaching to embrace and hands holding out gifts and legs marching firmly beside and backs bearing the heavy load. And this is how we know what love is: people laying down their lives for each other, for me. Loving me. Holding me. Sending me. Believing in me. I am deliriously and undeservingly lavished with more promise and more future than ever before.
I felt last weekend like my whole church accepted and affirmed me.
I feel this week like my friends have emerged, in matching T-shirts and with banners to declare that they love and support me enough to send me on my way to Africa.
I feel like the God who has been hiding behind a distant cloud has emerged as the beautiful mother who would kiss my cheeks and really love me until I feel good enough to be loved.
And the voice of "reason" the voice of "truth" the voice of "reality" is telling me this is all too pathetic. But I don't care. If needing to feel loved is pathetic, then there's enough room for that adjective along all the others that describe me amid the deep, high, wide, endless love my mother and father have unleashed.