Asking for rest in God

Sometimes I am tired and confused.

Take, for example, lately. I recently moved back to Kirksville, Mo., from home for the school year. Transitions are hard for me; I feel like a plant that's been uprooted, plunked down in another place and expected to grow. It exhausts me.

It's also my senior year at Truman. The "real world" is starting to look pretty real, and, yes, I am afraid.

I find myself wanting to leave home and wanting to stay, wanting things to change and wanting them to remain the same, wanting to never grow up and wanting nothing more than to be grown already. These emotions are pulling me in all directions, and I just want peace and rest, to learn how to simply be in the midst of it all.

Here in the midst, God loves me. I'm finding so much comfort in that.

He loves me in the struggle, in my questions, in my confusion and fear. He's here with me, and that makes all of this good and lovely and worthwhile. He wants to teach me about who he is through everything I experience, and I love that. No time is wasted or worthless as long as he's in it.

As I've been thinking about all of this, the song "Show Me" by Audrey Assad has been really meaningful. The lyrics are gorgeous lines of poetry asking God to do beautiful things with the singer's life, but for right now just letting her rest and be with God.

I love this because the lyrics are so honest in the desire for rest. They free me to ask for rest in God, too. This song reminds me I don't have to strive; if I am open to him and follow him, God will do his work in and through me.

In Luke 1:74, Zechariah sings that God has promised to set us "free to worship him without fear." When I think of worshipping without fear, it is a picture of me living my life with every piece of who I am -- all my hopes, desires, quirks, weaknesses, confusions, weariness and things about myself I find wrong or inadequate held out to God. It is me living for him with all I am, which moves me to live for other people with all I am.

Instead of choosing to feel only one emotion or the other in the midst of all of these feelings, I'm realizing I want to be all of these conflicting desires -- they all are a part of me. All I can do is hold my contradictions out to God, offering them to him to make sense of, to love, and to lead me where he wants. I can trust that place will be closer to him, and because of that, it will be somewhere beautiful.

Mia Pohlman is a Perryville, Mo., native studying at Truman State University. She loves performing, God and the color purple – not necessarily in that order.