What Is Best

'The girls might be pretty,
and fair may be the city...'

If you are a little bit like me: a plant that has been planted and uprooted and repotted in various soils and places, you will know - or at least wonder - what the journey back can sometimes feel like.

I always tell people that my transition to life in Oxford was hard. And boy, it was. But here was I, almost a year later, on a plane to Dublin not quite sure how to feel about 'going back'. There were times when I thought of leaving Dublin as a sign of failure - I couldn't 'stay', and going back to England felt ok, but it felt like second best.

Yet to my surprise, being back in Dublin didn't feel emotional at all. It didn't even feel like walking back into some kind of old life I'd left behind. It really just felt like being somewhere I'd been before, with lots of familiar faces and places, cockles and mussels all a-live a-live oh, but it didn't break my heart to go back to Oxford.

God has given me love: love to receive and love to give to many people around me here. And this is the life he is calling me to live now. To love and to live where he has placed me - no second best, no big plans, and no regrets.

Moving on feels good, friends. It doesn't always (or does it ever?) come easy, but I don't know many things that taste sweeter than the peace and healing and reconciliation that come along with it, except perhaps that of forgiveness.

"The man who has God for his treasure has all things in One." A.W Tozer

Dublin and Ireland will always hold a special place in my heart, but whatever I thought I had lost there must've either been completely removed or replaced by something a thousand times better, for while I was there no sense of loss or hurt did I experience.

And it felt good. :)

A wise man whose life and death will always inspire me once said:

"What is, is actual - what might be simply is not, and I must therefore not query God as if He robbed me - of things that are not. Further, the things that are belong to us, and they are good, God given and enriched. Let not our longing slay our appetite for living."

Perhaps this should be my prayer. That God would continue to teach me how to live life now and to dwell neither on the past nor on the things I 'want' and 'haven't got yet'. But to seek and find his love, his grace, which, I like to believe, are already enough... and are his very best for us.