No sleep for Shane.

Couldn't sleep tonight, too much going on in the ol' head. What's with that, anyway? Why can't I just stop for ten seconds and fall in to a deep and restful sleep? This seems a terrible design flaw.

But then I remember God made day, and it was good. He made night, and it was good. He made Man, and it was good.

We need the nights, sometimes He needs to hit us when we're most vulnerable, most tired, most emotional, and at our weakest.

So maybe tonight I didn't sleep.

My Life is Average.

I'm starting to understand something.

It's been an odd year for me, a year that's told me in many ways that I'm part of the rule, not the exception, a year that's taught me the inevitability of being average, of my statistical propensity to be a statistic. I probably won't get rich writing an even marginally readable novel, nor will I in all likelihood become the most treasured professor at a prestigious school. I'll most likely live a life that looks like many others in many ways, and many other angsty teens the world over are thinking these same thoughts in defeat this very night.

Now, though, emerging from this defeat, this concession to the middle ground, I've found that while those things may be true as a matter of course and are not in and of themselves even something that should be disdained, I don't have to alter my course of life to fit the actuality of my fate. I don't need to resign myself to never writing a book, just to the idea that my life is not a failure if I don't. I don't need to stop pursuing college professorship because I know it may be impractical, but I do need to apprise myself fully of the situation so that I may be a lucid wanderer into the shrouded keep of time. Really it's a question of identity, in God, in family, in friends, in character. If I realize that who I am and the ultimate quality of my life is not contingent upon what I do as a vocation or where I live or what I produce, I'm freed of both the incessant quest to gain those things at all cost and the hopeless scramble to avoid the fact that they very well may not happen. I cannot, I will not resign myself to being average, to not being productive, to not living a radical life of faith. I will, I must resign myself, release myself really, to the peaceful truth that my success or failure in meeting these goals in no way affects who I'll be, who I've been, what I am, or whose I am.

So then it's ok to fail! It's acceptable to succeed! I'm not stuck in the tunnel vision of my own ambition because I realize it's inherently fallible and broken. What's never broken, what's immutable, what's set in stone is that I serve a God who asks just this: Love Me. Love those I love.

That's simple, right?