Your courage asks me what I am made of.

I was blog reading here tonight, thinking about this longing to do more, be more, seek more, question more...just more something. I was on a metaphorical journey in search of the "more". when I heard the lines of this video.

My favorite lines in this video are:

"Your courage asks me, what I am made of? Your courage asks me, what I am afraid of, and what do I know of love." And then the line: "Your pain has changed me."

These lines represent a re-occurring set of questions in my life. Questions that come up every couple years. They are questions about more of the form of life, then the function. "How shall I than live?" They ask me more than: What am I going to do with my next five or ten years. Or even "who am I?"

Instead, they ask: What is the container of my life? What are courage, love, or other people's stories asking me? Have I been changed by someone else's pain? In the face of anyone who lives bravely, how can I live a mediocre life? And ultimately this last question is the one I always seem to trip across every couple years.

I no longer think I can change the world, like I did in high school after reading "I love the word impossible" by Ann Kiemel. And that would be a bit too narcissistic anyway. But I think this one poem of hers will probably haunt me until I'm dead. And for now I think it is not such a bad thing to be haunted by even if what the impossible is has now changed for me. (She writes totally in lower case, just fyi)

i love the word impossible
by Ann Kiemel

i love the word impossible
it's like joy after sorrow.
people being friends after being enemies.
rainbows after drenching rain.
a wound healed.
sunsets on quiet evenings after hot, noisy days.
paralyzed, injured limbs learning to grow strong and useful again.
forgiveness after wrong.
truth after fog.
new l0ve-made babies.
birds learning to fly and own the sky.
bitterness turned to mellowness.
fresh, genuine, hope ...once abandoned.
people finding each other at the right moments in unexpected obscure places
for God-ordained reasons.
i love that word impossible because my God believes in adventure and extraordinary mountains, and he dares to be alive
in a world crawling with terrible situations.
he promises to be bigger than any impossibility
because he is love and love always finds a way through in time.
love isn't scared
it build bridges instead of walls
it always hangs on
it waits with stubborn, strong, hope sometimes even years.
love makes God alive in far more than human souls .....

IMPOSSIBLE means that i, an ordinary young woman, can be something special and significant in an enormous hurting world.
I can be love where i live and that is Christ...
and he really does make ALL the difference!

See if you read that many times when you were young it would still probably be with you too.