You, Glorious You!

This Morning's Walk

I am prego and I am trying to stay in shape in the process, and so this morning, I felt extra gregarious and decided to get to campus early and get in a 30-minute walk before the day got up and running for me.

And I loved it!

It made me remember why I loved living in NYC. I am all about "exploration walks", I am realizing. My husband, if you want to make him blissfully happy, should be left alone in the mountains of Colorado or New York, and let loose to hike and camp like a wilderness survivor for a week. He comes back a new man.

Me? Give me an interesting city or downtown area, or a college campus I don't know so well, where activity will be happening all around me, and I can walk and see, and I will be energized and empowered, like a waterfall through my very soul. I'm like a permatourist. (Throw some coffee in the mix, and maybe a pastry, and it gets even better. Another reason I loved living and working in NYC.) 

For one thing, to me, there is something so empowering about getting myself places with just my own two legs. This is especially true because about ten years ago I tore my ACL badly enough that I couldn't walk, and without modern medicine, I could still be a cripple today. (I've actually pictured a medieval cripple that looks something like Tiny Tim and lives near a castle as I have considered my alternate universe 14th-century fate.) So, suffice it to say, I am thankful in a uniquely aware way for my own two legs.

For another thing, I am just very curious. One of my closest friends and a former roommate of mine, Leslie, told me that when she was a kid, she used to say, "Me do it!" And at 20, she was still that way. She and I shared a house our senior year of college with three other girls in a historic neighborhood in College Station. I called Leslie the "man of the house". Garbage needed taking out? Leslie was jumping on it. You need a pickup truck to haul something across campus? Leslie has one and she's already getting out her keys. I felt so lazy and prissy next to my dear friend, Leslie. 

So what was Elizabeth's childhood phrase? It was, "Is it?" as in, "What is it?" I was told one time that I should be a pastor because I ask good questions. It is part of what drives me as an actress--this consistent curiosity about the people and lives around me. There is a gorgeous academic building on the University of Alabama campus that I like to walk to. It's called Shelby Hall, and it is constructed so wondrously of marble and stone that I want to shoot some sort of CIA movie in its echoey front foyer.

When I go to Shelby Hall, I picture myself as a science student, playing with test tubes and working out complicated physics equations in class every day, preparing for a stable career that might actually pay me well (ah, what a life!). I am fascinated by this building for the very fact that it represents a daily life that I know nothing about. I wish I could sit in on one of the classes just to have my eyes opened to an environment so unlike my own. In my classes, we do weird, cool things like stretching and making noises and trying out foreign dialects and yelling at each other. 

What are science people like? My dad is a science and nature guy, and being around him, I feel balanced out somehow.

So, what empowers you? What makes you tick? I love that we are all so unique. Okay, let's be honest, as a fallen human being, I don't always love it that we are all so unique, because it means that you want different things than I do, and that we will clash if we aren't careful and loving to each other. But it's great, too, you know? And when we do love all the other unique souls around us, well, it is a thing of beauty.

I love the Biblical idea that we are all, each one of us, "imago dei", made in God's image. As the band Switchfoot puts it, we are "a beautiful letdown." As our Tulsa pastor, Ricky Jones, put it the other day in a sermon podcast we listened to, we are not just fallen and sinful, but also oh so glorious. 

And your glory is different from mine, unique and special because at some point, at exactly the right time, God looked at nothing, and said, "You," and there was you.

Glorious you.