Heather Castle is a development professional, an adjunct professor at Azusa Pacific University, and an ENFP on Myers Briggs Personality Test. She was born in August and is left handed  She is a bad joke teller but is working on it. Coming soon: she will write for a living one day. 

I recently experienced a melt down.

I mean, a MELT DOWN.

It was the kind of emotional break where the harder you cried, the better you felt. I woke up severely puffy-eyed the next morning (and to be honest you can’t really look bad the day after you disintegrate into emotional oblivion, because you’ve already met your worst self – snot and tears and trembling lips. You can only look awesome from there really).

I cried to my mom on the phone, I cried to my dad on the phone, I cried to my husband in person, I cried to my therapist in person, I cried to God in the shower and I cried to myself in a robe after my shower. And the reason? I was scared. I was scared to start a new adventure where I would be pushed to give parts of myself I didn’t think I had. I was crumbling under the weight of “what will be?” and had zeroed in on an apocalyptic, doom-and-gloom attitude. All I could do was cry about it.

I had accepted the position to teach an upper division collegiate course and I was PANICKING. There was no way out, I had to show up to class and teach and I had to suffer through my own worst nightmare of cottonmouth and Power Points. I was experiencing chest pains before I had even started.

I have convinced myself over the years that there is a standard or bar of “success” that has been calculatedly placed precisely one inch above my head. I will never reach it. In this most recent episode, I was expecting to gracefully catapult myself above this metaphorical standard, only to trip before I even left the ground.  As I prepped for this class, I would succumb to momentary flash forward images of crashing and burning in front of twenty young adults who were being groomed (seriously, groomed as we speak) to become incredible critics of public speakers and mediocre teachers (I suppose I should know this, as I was one of these devil students).

If you talk to my mom, and my dad, and my brother, and my husband even, they would all tell you that this is completely normal behavior on my part.

In fact my dad tried to reassure me through my sobs that he had been slightly worried that I wasn’t acting my usual worried self before the start of this class. That is because I have established something of a cultural norm in my family; a bad pattern of behavior where I publically experience severe turmoil before I start something new.

Usually if I choose to do something new wherein the outcomes have not yet been established (actual outcomes, not predicted ones), I find that this equation holds the potential to expose everyone (who is everyone??) to the fact I am a big fat faker and that I really belong back in high school where I need to learn to grow up.

Good grief, how’s that for insecurity?

But (and there is always a “but”) here’s a profound discovery I realized about myself: when I look to the beginning of something new I am blinded to the fact that there is an end in sight. I forget that.

The grandeur of the beginning, of “new”, the expectations and standards and setting the bar really high and of course the attempt to reach for the stars, it all clouds my mind.

I get blinded at the start.

I can’t actually see the other side.

When I am faced with the choice between two roads, I usually find myself at the beginning of a hill. I generally reach the top of this hill when I have made a choice and I endure in order to see this decision through to its end. Once I’ve made it to the top of the hill, I am able to see the other side of the mound; I have the “end in sight” and I can make out what the next phase of my journey might start to look like. Hope then is the anticipation at arriving on the other side of that hill with all my limbs intact.

At some point, and this is the truth,  we will no longer need to remember that there is an end in sight; we won’t need to remind ourselves that this too shall pass, that we will overcome. This is because, I think, the life we hope for is the day when Jesus will come back. This is the point of Advent: to remember that we have a hope that one day, we will no longer need hope – when there will be no more crying, no more death, no more suffering, no more waiting until “this” is over.

Hope is that expectation, that anxious waiting for what will come to pass. And if we are Christians concerned with the kingdom of God, which is here and which has come and which is God with us, Immanuel, than we are in the business of the completion and the fullness of God’s glory now. We might even say we work to “end hope”, that is to say, to no longer need hope. To me this is a fully present reality and a future endeavor.

And this is also somewhat problematic for a girl who gets sidelined by the beginning of things. Because if I can’t see the end in sight, if I can’t remember that there is an ending and a completion, I lose hope and faith and love. I lose it all and even turn on my own self.

I forgot that there is an end in sight – that hope is in the completion and the fulfillment of all the expectations set before me in my syllabus. Right now the end feels a thousand years away, but I am here to remind you that baby girl this too shall pass!

We are in the process of working ourselves into the completion of the fullness of Gods kingdom on earth and I believe this with my whole heart because here’s the real truth: God lives in my body and I trust that and forget that all the time.