It rained this morning. I could hear the raindrops hitting the window and the drum of rain on the roof. If each drop represented one new idea or fact or concept that I have learned since coming to CIT, I’m not sure there would be enough of them – even though it rained steadily.

 

All my life I have been a person who categorizes things and organizes them in a systematic order. When I can’t remember things, I tell my kids that it’s because every year of my life I have added filing cabinets in my brain and filed things into folders in each drawer. If I don’t remember something immediately, I haven’t really forgotten it. I just don’t know which folder I put it in. As I get older, it takes me longer and longer to search through and find it because there are always more folders and more cabinets.

Over the years, I have been aware that some of the information I filed under certain categories probably didn’t really fit there and needed to be re-categorized and re-filed. But it was a slow process – one that I could take as long as I liked to do and if it didn’t get finished, maybe it didn’t really matter. Today, after my 8^th day of classes, I feel like the drawers of the filing cabinets in my brain have been torn open, folders have been pulled out and emptied onto the floor in a mishmash of ideas, thoughts, values, beliefs, feelings, truth, choices, preferences…..where once there was order, there is now chaos.

For some of you, this would not be a bad thing. You love chaos, disorder, change. For me, it is traumatic. How can I think all this through and put it all back in the right drawers? How much of what is written in those folders needs to be crossed out and rewritten? How will I know that I am rewriting it correctly? How will I ever find the time to clean up this mess?

Unable to face reading my assignments and adding more to the overwhelming clutter on the floor of my mind, I took a walk. The sun was shining. There was a refreshing breeze blowing. I went to a cemetery just down the road and respectfully sat on a tombstone. I looked at the blue sky, felt the warm sun, listened to the breeze rustling the branches of the trees and felt the peace of the moment sink into my spirit. As I sat, wondering how I was going to handle all the “stuff” that was in my brain, God spoke to my heart and said, “Let it be. Don’t organize it. Don’t try to figure it out. Just let it be.”

And so I will.