Music & Lyrics.

Well hello there.

It feels good to say hello amidst a season of goodbyes.

My internship ended. It's over. I'm home. In Riverside. No longer a resident of central Oregon. No longer a resident of Washington Family Ranch.

It's weird.

The feelings inside me are clashing. Gnashing. They're bobbling around inside me like ricocheting pinballs. I stand above, peering through the glass, as I feverishly push those two side buttons, not really knowing what element these balls of concentrated feelings will bounce off next.

I was so excited to be done. Truly ecstatic. But now as I lay in a bed in a dim room listening to Florence as she talks about slipping into darkness, there are so many fears bubbling up inside me. I can already see myself slipping back into oblivion. Living a life without purpose.

I almost feel as if I'm standing in the cloud of a recent stampede. Forgive me, but I'm pulling out a Lion King analogy. Simba, standing on the rock, calling out for his father. The stampede has passed but the cloud hasn't settled. He calls out for his father. His cries are shrill, heavy with fear, but still laden with hope. This year was a stampede. So full. So emotionally traumatizing. You enter into this incredible community where everyone loves you, encourages you, lifts you up, spurring you on toward love and good deeds. You enter into this morbid life of servitude in which you're giving everything, every bloody ounce of energy, to demonstrate how much you truly love the Lord. It becomes a fierce battle. A fierce and unhealthy battle in which your heart gets thrown through the wringer. Thrown through the wringer, and then hung out to dry. Hung out to dry when the internship ends.

All of a sudden it's over. And as you drive away, your body racked with that real intense sobbing you normally only see in movies, the world you called home for a year gets smaller and smaller until it no longer exists within your line of vision.

So as I sit in these open wounds, the cloud settling around me, I'm trying to figure out what my new life looks like without camp. I'm reminded of a Death Cab song called Summer Skin. "Labor Day came and went, and we shed what was left of our summer skin...we peeled the freckles from our shoulders. Our brand new coats were so flushed and pink."

Summer is over. Although the heat wave in southern California speaks otherwise, summer is over. Camp is over. And as I shed this summer skin, my brand new coat is flush and pink. Tender. Raw. Incredibly susceptible to infection. The poisonous whispers of Satan are easily embedded in these open wounds.

I experienced such deep and rich friendship in that place and it's been stripped off me...Natalie Imbruglia, torn, lying naked on the floor. Yes, seeing the same people everyday, working with them, playing with them, living with them...it was rough in the beginning, but soon it is comfortable, it is dependable, reliable. But like all things, it's expendable. Those friendships will never be the same.

I've toyed around and joked about the idea of camp life not being real life. Because it's not. You can go there to have spiritual awakening, to have incredible mountain high experiences, to be stretched, molded into the person God created you to be. But then your time at camp comes to end and you have to leave. You have to enter back into this broken world. And it's weird. The theme of our intern year was "it's just weird." I could rattle on for hours about why and how it's weird. It just is. And being catapulted out of that weird life and back into this real one is traumatizing. I think I'll be ok eventually, but right now, I'm feeling out of sorts.

Trying to wrap my mind around what happened this year. "Processing" as people like to call it. My thoughts are muddled. My feelings are like I said, little hyperactive pinballs.

I know that God is present, but He feels pretty distant right now. I think I sort of set Him up on a shelf while I've tried to sort things out, which duh, is not the brightest thing to do.

"It's all over and I'm standin' pretty in this dust that was a city. If I could find a souvenir just to prove the world was here. And here it is, a red balloon, I think of you and let it go." That's Nena, 99 Red Balloons.

I'm off to Kinko's to get this bloggy bound up nicely. So then maybe I can read through it when times are dark, when I'm trudging through the valleys. This valley I'm in right now feels a little bleak. The future is so uncertain. I don't know where I'm living. I don't know who my friends are anymore.

I'm standing at a fork in the road. I could choose the path that leads right back to the life I lived prior to this year. Or I could choose the path that is freshly carved into the brush, the one in which I hold tightly to the lessons I've learned this year, continuing to hurdle over the lies I used to believe about myself. It's uncertain and scary. This whole starting over thing. It's rough.

I'm nervous about accountability. Who will have the audacity to call me out. Who's astringent and abrasive words will keep me in line when I try to make stupid decisions. The world's a scary place people. For now, I'll keep hiding out in this cool dark room. I have eleven days to lay around and "process" before I enter back into "the real world."

Pray for me.

The end.