a bit lost

I'm beginning to learn that the more I find myself, the more lost I really am. From leaving my job and my home, to Nicaragua and back a few times, with a cross-country grease bus trip mixed somewhere in between. The world seems less and less like Heaven and more and more like it was supposed to be. I find that there is death in all of it and yet pockets of beauty alive everywhere I look. Some are wider than others and some more grand! California is home to the smog of LA and also the seals and sea lions who drape themselves across pure beaches that touch the bluest of waters I've ever seen. People scour the trash dumps of Nicaragua for food and live among ashes while fighting disease. Yet in the midst of this all this, the most beautiful flower I've ever seen creeps out through the waste......as if to say, "I'm still here". Oregon was the most beautiful state I'd ever seen, and yet it was almost the only place where I was turned down for grease at a restaurant. If the whole world was created good, then things must have progressively gotten worse; I wonder if they have yet begun to get better. Are we on the up and up? Is the kingdom of heaven really at hand?

This weight of the imperfect hits me today. I feel it as if it's something real. More than anything, I want to find my place in it. I don't know exactly where it comes from, but I know that it should not be. There is nothing I can do, except live through it and continue to hope for the beauty that is on the other side. Tomorrow will bring greater things.