Faith Alone

Quick recap of the last month:

Christmas happened. It was a blessing. The Good News was shared clearly and repeatedly.

I was struck that next Sunday morning by how truly ungrateful I have been in the past year, and resolved to praise the Lord - to be thankful for my life. HOW I have been blessed. 

That same Sunday afternoon, I was surprised (shocked) by my boyfriend who flew into Delhi a day earlier than I was expecting and proposed marriage to me within thirty seconds of finally seeing my face.

I said yes.  [Fiancée status.]

The next day was New Year's Eve, when Andrew and I celebrated the one-year anniversary of our relationship on the rooftop of the building where we both lived in 2010, in the very spot where we had gazed at the full Delhi-colored moon and had many of our first meaningful conversations. It was unreal to stand in the same spot two and a half years removed and to realize it was both there that we met long ago, and there that we that day embraced; reunited, engaged. What a crazy blessing.

I don't usually do resolutions or the great beginning of the year self-improvement endeavor.

But along with a healthy dose of promises to myself, to kick off this new year I've been reading a book called "Women of Extraordinary Faith".  I've really been enjoying it, and I've really been challenged by it. It contains short biographies of 20 outstanding women who made a difference in the name of Christ; their stories span the time between the seventeenth century and the modern day. I don't think the book is exceptionally well-written. I'm not convinced the choice of heroines wasn't arbitrary. I'm not even entirely sure that all of the women share all of my exact doctrinal convictions. 

You see, it's not the author or these specific women who were extraordinary - what is extraordinary is the faith that they share.

These women come from a variety of backgrounds and have vastly different personalities, but there is one trend that I tend to notice among them:  from Mother Teresa to Mahalia Jackson, most of these women were in deep ways lonely people.  Though it seems these women didn't lament their lot in life, whether deserted by husbands, bereft of families, or unloved by their parents, they were all shaped by a sense of  'alone'.

Realizing this deeply impacts me. 

The more I learn about the realities of life, the more I learn about the human nature, the more I learn about marriage and the more people that I meet, the more I find it to be true that no matter how fulfilled anyone may seem they are never fully loved or understood by those who surround them. 

I fully believe that each of us has heights of passion and depths of despair set in motion by occurrences, truths, or ideals, combinations of which are shared by no other person alive.

Somehow, the best way that I've heard this summed up is in some advice that was given to me while I was single, working wedding photography to make my way to India. I was sighing about it, a little tired of being the third wheel. A friend told me, "Sure, it's no fun to go to a wedding alone. But you're not the only one there who is frustrated. Whether it be newlyweds disenchanted by marriage, middle-aged couples who are growing apart, or widows left without anyone's hand to hold: every person in that room is lonely somehow."

Yes, we need each other. But people don't meet all our needs. People aren't what we are longing for. Somehow in the human heart there must be a way to embrace the 'alone' and by means of extraordinary faith be shaped into a being reliant only on our Divine Father.

I pray this year before any other resolution that as I learn to be a wife, a woman, an ambassador, I will be characterized by the extraordinary faith that is available to every person who has been Saved by Grace 'alone'. 

Happy New Year!

Love from Delhi,

Julie