Affirming My Convictions

With elegance, power, fear, quickness and pure beauty, the magnificent lights of the heavens reach down to brush the landscapes that surround me.

I cannot help but watch the lightning, as it dances across the blackened night sky, and feel like it represents so much of what I am feeling at this very moment.

Traveling down a country road akin to what I would picture a man's final walk in life to be - solitary, focused and having only one direction and purpose - I sing along to my favorite songs blaring through the radio, trying to match the emotion set forth by the singers themselves. In this moment, as I let the music draw out and deliver my own emotions, coupled with the awe-inspiring world around me, I feel alive. I feel right.

I also feel strong. The kind of strength I haven't felt in a long time.

I think many of us search for the kind of strength that currently courses through my soul, usurping uncertainty for the sake of a more appropriate driving force. Many - if not most - of us work tirelessly, endlessly and hopelessly for but a glimpse... perhaps even just a taste... of the end result that will make our efforts seem not in vain.

Strikes chase the clouds with direction from wind and God himself, painting the bleakness with pure light. My music drowns me out only in its sound, holding not a flame to the nearly-overwhelming sense of excitement that leaps about in my mind.

In the span of just a few short weeks, my life seems to have changed completely. How much is still to be determined. Nevertheless, these changes have come and now I find myself in the role of the navigator. The course set in front of me and the tasks all but known, I have the responsibility and the honor of leading the way to my own success. And I feel strong in my ability.

I also feel the creeping fear that accompanies most feelings of confidence. But, not unlike these luminescent fires of the heavens, my confidence and desire can only be stifled by the will of God, and even then I will know that my confidence is not undue, but merely in need of guidance from a hand that knows where my feet will fall before I even take a step.

As the rain begins to glisten with an iridescence becoming of the most flawless of diamonds, I look to the sky once more as the lightning seems to challenge the very will of mother nature.

This is not unlike my own sentiment towards the Shakespearean "slings and arrows" that will befall my path. Despite their impending presence, I only look forward with anticipation. For I know that the pitfalls ahead of will be deep, but they are not chasms that will ensnare my sense of self; they are only obstacles that will hinder me slightly, and empower me eternally.

Therefore, just as the brazen storm in which I am caught neither yields or submits to an obstacle within its path, I shall keep on my own path and I shall do so with a new found confidence in my own strength and my own convictions, slowed only by the truths that will reveal themselves in time. And with these truths, I will affirm the very strength that I - and that we - have always had and merely needed to rediscover.