freedom in nothing

i have to fight horrible thoughts nearly every weekday morning. thoughts like, "i hate this place. i hate everything. i want to leave, dear God i want to leave. just take me back to my dad and the mountains." i don't know why mornings are so hard and why it's only the mornings that i have to work. i have a fantastic job as the recess teacher at a really good elementary school. it just doesn't make sense. when i think through things, nearly everything i'm doing right now should make me feel extraordinarily alive - community, corporate prayer, kids, stability, creativity - so why do i find myself begging to leave the place i know God sees me?

good freaking question.

it keeps coming back to something about freedom in nothing. i wish i had the words to express this. they end up coming in clarity right before i fall asleep. everything hazy rights itself and for that split second i know without  a doubt that where i'm at is a beautiful thing, that God is God, that these warring things inside of me will find their peace, but then i wake up the next morning with the same intense dread and fumble around trying to put those pieces of calm and knowing back together so i can breathe. 

dear God, have mercy.

so i'm left with trusting wisps of knowing and being. thank God for those wisps and that there are wisps at all.

the other day one of my roommates started reading to me a book of quotes from mother teresa. when she became a nun, she spent twenty some years teaching middle class children in india. she said she never felt so happy. at some point, she felt "the call within the call," left the school, and went to work with the poorest of the poor. she said it was the hardest decision she ever made, harder even than the choice to leave her family in macedonia and dedicate her life to God. some years later, she thought she was going to be able to step down from her position with the sisters of charity, but her fellow sisters persuaded her otherwise. her response, "i was expecting to be free, but God has his own plans."

let me be free. dear God, let me be free, but i guess your will be done.

trying to piece together those wisps... i think freedom must lie in nothing, being nothing, with the ultimate recognition that anything that i am, anything that i do, anything that i will be has no founding in myself. i can't do it. the strength and talent and ability i have? all a gift. the will and intellect and compassion? also not mine. these things, these things aren't ours. He gives and He takes, blessed be the name of the Lord.

forgive me. dear God, forgive me. thank you that you see me. thank you that you know me. thank you that i am alive. dear God, thank you. thank you. thank you. i'm nothing, and you are Good.

we must live life beautifully; we have Jesus with us and he loves us. if we could only remember that God loves us, and we have the opportunity to love others as he loves us, not in big things, but in small things with great love, then [our country] becomes a nest of love... a burning light of peace in the world.

                                                        - mother teresa