E is for Evaporation

I'm grateful that the snow has finally melted away. It's weird though how hard we have to work to dig our cars out after a snowstorm, and then a week later, the snow just melts anyway. What's up with that? You work so hard for something that just disappears.

My life has had a reoccurring theme of evaporation lately. For instance, the other day at work, I worked all day to edit a document and got so much progress done, and then the document just disappeared. I had forgotten to save it in a different location, and then it was gone. None of my work counted for anything because it was just gone. You can imagine my anger. It was pretty much a broken record of the f-word repeating in my head. A few weeks ago, my ipod just decided to delete everything on it. Sounds like no big deal, but you have no idea how long I have worked to organizing everything perfectly. Countless hours have been spent to organizing my music and videos just so. It's all gone now. I recognize that these situations do not matter much in the grand scheme of things. But they are like physical representations of why I'm actually angry.

The reason I've actually been angry is because my relationship with Ryan just evaporated into thin air. What does that mean about the 2.5 years of my life spent trying to make something work that wasn't ever really working in the first place? I am not consoled by the thought that it was a growing period and that sometimes relationships don't work out, blah blah blah. The whole thing just evaporated. Which makes me feel like, well, why did I bother?

Before snow evaporates, it gets really ugly from dirt and stones and all that road gunk. It gets pretty gross. By the time the snow is tainted by all that grossness, you just can't wait for it to disappear. But it evaporates and leaves all the junk behind. So did I really put all that work into shoveling for something that would just disappear in a week?

But it never really disappears I guess. The snow either seeps into the ground or goes back into the air. It's not gone. And it leaves behind the junk which kind of settles again on the road. It's the unseen aftermath that kills you. And part of the reason it kills you so much is because you can't see it. No one can see it except for you, so you kind of wonder if you're going crazy. What are you left with? The only proof that it even happened is that your back is really sore from the shoveling. It all melted away and left you standing there alone.

The snowstorms this year were pretty brutal, and I was digging my car out for hours sometimes. And when it's all done, you just stand there... numb and exhausted, not really sure where to go from there.I think snow is really beautiful when it's falling down from the sky. It's peaceful, and it's pure and untouched. I look forward to it. But at this point, I wonder whether that beauty worth the work you put into it or not.

But such is life. We work and toil, and for what? It's all going to evaporate. There is nothing new under the sun. I think that's supposed to be freeing, but why does it make me feel so trapped? I just wanted the work to count for something. I just wanted the time not to feel wasted.

And yet, such is grace, reaching down for me, telling me that I have nothing to work for--it is finished. There's still this pesky business of shoveling. Why do we bother? It's just going to disappear. As Mother Theresa said, "What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway." After all, "In the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway." Grace says it isn't about the final product or the work, it's about moving and serving and having hope, no matter how many times things evaporate.