Flying has never felt further away than it has these last couple of days. I have been reduced. I am no longer the artist-mechanic-girl who cannot possibly learn fast enough to know what she needs to. I am just…a girl who folds t-shirts and who looks up at the sky always. I work in a warehouse where I count t-shirts, fold them, distribute them, pack them, stack and unstack them. When everyone goes out to smoke, I look up to the space between the giant concrete walls of one warehouse and another and I wonder why I am not up there. How do I get closer to the stars? How do I make a home among the clouds? That old yearning turns anew inside me. And I ache.

I ache the way I did in high school…so much so in fact that I feel as if I am back in that place, making plans and realizing that flight school was at least 5 years away. I do not know if you have ever waited 5 or more years for something, but it is a long time. And then to reach the end and feel no closer than when you started…well, it is a little disappointing. Besides, it is not just that I feel no closer than when I started, but rather that I have reached the end of the plans that I know anything about (and if you have seen the plans that I did know something about, you know how truly lost I am).

Historically, I have been gifted with an inordinate amount of faith and a total disregard for descriptors like impossible. And on the days where I have faltered, there has always been a reminder. I once spoke with a college recruiter who asked me what I wanted to do. I told him I wanted to fly but that I didn’t like telling people that because it seemed ridiculous, like becoming an astronaut. He scolded me soundly, apologized that his school had no flight program, and then immediately turned to a cafeteria full of people and announced what I wanted to do. Then, he told me I was committed. I have had friends arrange flights and dentists give me children’s books titled Violet the Pilot. I have had professors pay for mechanic exams and homeless people tell me that all I have to do is keep the faith because I will get where I am going. I have had all manner of unexpected persons pour encouragement into this silly little dream. They have helped to build a wall against the tidal wave of voices who doubt that I will ever make it, who need me to convince them constantly that this is where I am going and that I have not given up yet. They have given me rest from my constant defense of a dream when I was too worn out to convince both myself and other people.

Most recently, I met a man named Jeffrey Jackson in the unemployment office. We met to discuss my re-employment options as a mechanic. I told him that what I really wanted was to fly. He looked at me and said in his almost-northernized-southern-drawl, “Darlin, we all want to fly. The question is, how fast do you want to go?” We talked about his time in Vietnam and his flights over Montana. He told me that his wife won’t let him fly anymore because she knows that one day, he will just keep going and not come back because he’s crazy. “She’s right.” he told me. And as he talked about flying, that ache crept back. I had kept it busy with track and balance flights and promises to go to flight school when I had paid off my student loans etc.  But, talking with Jeffrey, I felt my bones and my heart begin to hurt. I felt the air in my lungs get heavy with desperation. Yes, I know this ache. Ten years I have carried it, ignored it, and been driven by it all at the same time. In eighth grade, I told a friend that I knew I would go fly because a good God would never give someone a longing like this and then ignore it.

And yet, flight school has never seemed more impossible. The sky has never seemed further away. Now, I simply do not know what to do. I pack t-shirts. I have come to the end of all of the obstacles that I thought were between me and flight school, but I feel as though nothing has changed. It is still out of reach. It is hard not to wonder if I did life wrong. By faith, I know how patiently I should wait. By faith, I know that God has brought me this far and He will bring me the rest of the way. By faith, I know that if I rest in His grace, I have enough and I can be content.

The last few months have been a ton of being removed from a bad situation. I hated living in Tigard, mostly because it was lonely and nobody had time for me. I needed encouragement and Tigard had none of that. Emotionally, I starved. My attempts to reach out to people usually ended in the realization that you cannot force people to trust you and that I cannot trust people who do not trust me. I hated working at HAI, except for the aircraft. The drama and the constantly having to watch your back and keep up appearances was maddening…and exhausting. I cried out to God for months asking Him to change the situation. I had meant that He should give me encouraging friends and teach my coworkers to be better people. Instead, I got fired and evicted…and I have never been so relieved in my entire life. I have never had such a large amount of stress evaporate so quickly that I can wake up one day and feel the difference from waking up the day before. God brought me out of Egypt His way.

But now I am in the desert.  I understand now why the Israelites got into the desert and then rebelled. The desert was not what they expected. They had been filled with visions of a fertile and gentle Promise Land. They had left the beautiful land of Goshen on the Nile Delta. They were not equipped for the desert. Sure they had been slaves before, but they knew how to do that. It is easy to work hard and cry out to God to change things. But when He answers by taking you into the unkind and harsh desert, you begin to wonder if everything you believe about Him is accurate. You wonder what else you were wrong about. And in the thirst there, the rivers of the Promise Land could not possibly feel further away. They decided to make their own way.

And I? I am being given a lot of advice that feels like making my own way. I want to do it. I would call it “good stewardship” or some other NIV-extricated word like “being faithful with what I have been given”. But really, it would be the golden calf of my own desire to control my life. It would be fear and selfishness. I know that I am here to wait and to learn. There are things you can only learn in the desert. I just wish I knew how long I will be here. I need something to tell the ache inside me so it does not consume me. I am afraid that it will. The desperation keeps building as I try a new solution, a new direction and God says, “No not that way.” Again and again and again…and again. I am lost in the desert with a mysterious God. I am not really sure of anything, only that I cannot help but be jealous of the wind.