"It is a delight with terror in it!"

"I thought", she said, "that I was carried in the will of Him I love, but now I see that I walk with it.  I thought that the good things He sent me drew me into them as the waves lift the islands; but now I see that it is I who plunge into them with my own legs and arms, as when we go swimming.  It is a delight with terror in it!  The world is so much larger than I thought.  I thought we were going along paths - but it seems there are no paths.  The going itself is the path."  -C.S. Lewis, Perelandra

I first read the space fantasy Perelandra when I was in college, and (like a lot of C.S. Lewis' writings) it was a book that both articulated and shaped how I saw myself and my journey.  It was a time when life was beginning to open up before me, when the careful path I thought I must follow - indeed, the very person I had learned to describe as myself - was crumbling away.  I was beginning to glimpse an ocean of freedom before me.  The words of Lewis' female protagonist, an Eve-like figure that is beginning to realize her own will and possibilities, made me want to shout and sprint and leap (I don't dance very well, but I can run and jump).  Yes!  That was how I felt about the opening of possibilities around me: delight mixed with terror.

It's been more than 15 years since that time, and I've spent some of them throwing myself headfirst into the delight and terror of life, some of them gasping for breath in the undertow, and some of them with my back to the waves - trying to make a safe, quiet place for myself and my family to rest, away from both the danger and the exhilaration.

I find myself wanting to face the water again, to know the delight of plunging into life with my own legs and arms, to trust God through the fear that comes with it.  Beginning a new blog is part of that.  I find both a freedom and joy in writing and an terrifying sense of vulnerability in opening myself to others.  So here I go - hitting "Publish" and making a new start.  To the delight and the terror!