Private Thoughts

I am leaving the most respected gourmet Japanese restaurant in Quito. I noticed that throughout our meal cheesy old American music was playing. It didn't fit – We were in a restaurant too trendy, too refined. Yet when we walked out the door, another very old song began to play. “God must have spent // a little more time // on you.” I searched my mind, finally remembering that my very first boyfriend chose this song to epitomize his perception of me.

I did not think much of that moment in the restaurant until just now, two days later. I lay in bed, 1:15 in the morning, as the Quiteno rain clacks on my huge windows and my laptop is perched on my stomach and bent legs.

I think of it because I remember what I've been through. So many know of my physical disease, but many of my newer acquaintances do not know of the mental disease that I have fought so hard to shed. They do not know, rightfully, because it has become a different form of struggle. Less obvious, less infectious. I have no need to speak of it.

And in this moment I realize that it is much more than a miracle that I am still alive, that I breathe at all. And yet I smile, I live with powerful emotion, and I love. Love. I delight in knowing that this word, agape, is always developing in my understanding. I grow when I understand love to a greater degree.

I made it; I am here. Not to say that the hundreds of ridiculously privileged events and people I have experienced are nothing – no, I just acknowledge the amazing reality of this moment, alongside all the others. It is magic, you see, because I don't really know why I am still alive, but for the love that has been demonstrated to me by so many.

God must have spent a little more time on me. He cared for me so deeply when I had nothing to grasp within reality, he covered me, he knew me. This song is not just about God taking extra hours to craft me at conception, but God mentoring me, crying with me, pursuing me when all I could do was try to survive.

I do not understand what is happening in my heart right now. But I know it is good, it is real.

The rain sounds just like Oregon as it falls on my back patio. God is in the rain.

- R