Graduation, June-gloom, and Making Things New

Sitting backwards on a train, staring at the hazy horizon of marine layer. The endless stretch of palms and beach grass look out of place in this listless weather, the straight line of tracks seems to take us to some alternate reality in which meteorological normatives have been ruptured by a long-past nuclear apocalypse.

Floating radioactive ash, covering the windows of this Coastal Express, filling my brain with a vexing mix of doubts and glee, loss and new-fangled quests.

Like the palm trees sprinting away from me, I am out of place. Kicked out of the bubble, away from the boundaries of comfort and routine.

A forty-fifty-something middle-level exec is sitting across from me, and he’s throwing trail mix into his mouth and going on about a recent acquisition in his company, and his leather man-bag looks like it’s going to explode from the graphs and portfolios crammed in its pockets. “It’ll be interesting to see what happens with this new examiner in charge…” he goes on, and on, and he uses the word “stuff” in every sentence, which is ironic because he’s talking to his cohort with peanuts and m&ms stuffed in his mouth. I wonder if he even notices the nuclear apocalypse outside, if he can see that underneath eyeliner and lip gloss, the passenger across from him is having an existential crisis. I don’t think he does, because when I glance at him he gives me a sheepish half-smile.

Yeah, I’m really out of place. I’m done. Finished. Everything that I’ve ever known: wake up, school, lunch, work, eat dinner with Liz and crash in the nook of my twin bed is now morphing into wake up, find job, find job, find job, cry self to sleep as the sinking feeling of responsibility and reality and inadequacy find its way into the stems of my every thought. I wish the world wasn’t so honest with us newly grads, I wish they would have told us all that we’d find our dream careers as soon as we stepped foot off the commencement stage, that everything would be ok and that life as we knew it wasn’t coming to a

halting,
screeching
stop.

I may be overtly dramatic and absurd, but reading yahoo news articles every-other day that tell me nursing and accounting are the only two sectors with jobs in the whole universe, that my International Relations degree is just a fifty-thousand dollar piece of paper,

It’s not super encouraging.

But it’s ok. I’ll be ok. Because I know that Southern California gets June(to July)-gloom, but come August, come September, the rays of warm light penetrate everything, and the world of beaches and surfers and happy, sun-kissed people is put back to order.

It’s during those months where the days last forever and the nights are sleepy and warm that I’m reminded that restoration can be a cyclical process. We have days, weeks, months where our lives feel out-of-focus, where all of our plans and goals and dreams seem to be lost in some fog-covered horizon. There are times where we feel that all that was supposed to come to fruition, all that we were expecting gets crushed by a broken reality.

And for a second, we forget hope.

I think about what Jesus’ disciples felt like when he was beaten, shamed, crucified.
They must have felt like their entire existence was torn into a billion miniscule pieces.
Like how San Diego feels in June, only amplified by an infinite number.

This wasn’t supposed to happen.
It wasn’t supposed to pan out like this.
He was supposed to victoriously conquer this broken place,
He was supposed to bring His kingdom.

For those next few days, they must have faced a gloomy, abysmal future. They must have been broken-hearted that their hope for a new and better realm seemed lost. They must have felt out of place.

But then He conquered death.

Then August came, then the sun found its way out of the misty-skies, then Jesus rose from the grave. Living, breathing, tangible restoration was pulled from the ashes and brought back to life.

There will be June gloom here on the coast of California, there will be snow in Minnesota in winter, there will be amber, rusty colored leaves in Central Park mid-October. But everything in nature experiences a restoration, and the Earth points to that: summer still comes. The grass grows back, the world comes out of hibernation, the harvest still arrives. You will have bad days. Or weeks. Or seasons. You will have periods of complete and total insecurity, where the unknown consumes everything you were previously sure of.

But everything Jesus did, all the miracles he performed, his victory over death all point to God’s desire for restoration in ourselves, and on this Earth. So today, tomorrow, and throughout these next few months of unfamiliar territory, I just have to remind myself, continuously

That Jesus makes all things new.