Where's the Rand McNally Already?

They talk about weak spots in terms of chocolate cake and lottery tickets. My weak spot begins with a slow, internal sigh, a few hopeless thoughts flitting through my mind like forlorn moths bumping into screen and then a dive into a jagged hole of despairing introspection.

Where is my life going? If I grow, will I ever feel like it's enough? And, even then, will it all flop? Failure? Failure. Failure.

Weird coming from someone newly engaged, recent first home-buyer, less than one year old business starter. Yet I find my head constantly swiveling between black and white photos saluting the Statue of Liberty and Jesus returning on a horse.

I'm just saying.

I recently saw the new Alice and Wonderland. Aside from suddenly wanting cakes that say "Eat Me" to appear, there were three lines in it that stuck out in an eyebrow-furrowing, heart-thump kind of way. This was it: at three different points in the movie - three moments throughout the elaborate and adventurous and, of course, lesson-learning journey of Alice through Wonderland - the wise and mystical caterpillar (the one smoking the hookah, of course) said these things to Alice and in this order:

#1) You're hardly Alice.

#2) You're not quite Alice.

#3) You're Alice, at last.

Strangely, this helps me.

Because if I take a turn in my introspection from the gloom and despair and doubt and ask myself why I care so stinking much about where my life is heading, I realize this driving ache has been there since I was eating Gerber's and sitting in Desitin. I. want. to. become.

And then I remember this. Jesus actually knows who, as fleshy, pooping babies, we were intended to become. He knows how those few years in childhood put guilt on us we can't shake or how that relationship pumped us full of fear and worry or that we have been steeped in a culture that taught us to love and be loved conditionally.

He prods us. Pushes us. Asks for permission to change things, show us new organs he wants to put in us and does the surgery, to boot. Challenges us. Doesn't do the expected. Is painfully simple with his love. Treats us unlike the grandma or the boyfriend or the wife or the pastor or the best friend did.

We give ourselves to this and find out it's doing things to us. We. are. becoming. So much so that hope is snowballing and a part of me believes that at the end Jesus will take a drag of his hookah, exhale through his nose and say, "Jordan, at last."