From beneath the fog comes a hope and a cry for clarity.

Good grief. My head is all a-spin. In our church small group, we go around the group at the beginning to share "I am's". (This is where you get to tell others how you're doing, in a word or, at most, a phrase. Noone is allowed to comment on it. I like it because it gives everyone an equal voice, and lets the group know where each person is coming from that evening.) Anyways, last night, my statement was "I am frantic." It seems like within the last week, decisions and guesses are required from me at a non-stop pace.

Upon return from Hispaniola, the two weeks afterwards were quite nice--a time of reflection, recovery, and reporting gently filled my time. However, as my thoughts are pulled from March 2005, towards the next few years ahead of me, I'm finding a lot more questions than answers.

Shall we go back to Haiti?
Can we go back to Haiti?
Should I look for an internship?
Should I work a job simply for the money so I can pay off debt?
Where to live?
When do we start a family?

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about our unreasonable demand to be ready for everything we approach in life. The question came up as to whether or not there is a "theology of surprise". I posed the same topic to small group during the same week of the post, but to no avail.

For the first time in our short marriage, Faith and I are facing critical issues and questions that will shape and send us on our way. Where we may go excites us, but at the same time, thinking of where we may fail to end up scares the socks off of us. As we heed the Apostle Paul's "fear and trembling" tactics, we understand the approach. However, the underlying idea in the passage is that there is a spirit discernment required to figure out one's salvation, one's faith, one's journey.

So as we continue to pray, talk, argue, yell, stare, cry, sigh, laugh and then start all over again, I pose this dilemma to the space between heaven and earth...looking for a response from up above and identification from the world below.