Please welcome today’s guest writer, Ae Hee Lee.  She writes, “I graduated from Calvin on May 2013 with a BA in English and minors in ESL and writing. Currently I am visiting my home in Peru on a tourist visa and building a library, but in August I will take residence in the MFA program at the University of Notre Dame.”

Imagining good things will happen is not my forte. I’m terribly afraid of disillusionment. So this is what I do: I reverse jinx myself. I close my eyes tight, like a constipated kid, and think of all the worst possible outcomes. Then I convince myself that if I was able to think it up, it will not happen.

The reverse jinx doesn’t always work, though. It didn’t work on my senior year, the March of 2013. The worst possible outcome became reality, and I was left by the end of the month with four rejection letters from four different Comparative Literature programs and a purple mass of bruised confidence. I (officially) decided then that the reverse jinx was a waste of time and I would never do it again.

I dedicated the rest of 2013 reconfiguring my plans. While working here and there, I studied myself. And to keep it short, let’s just say that I found that poetry was forever stuck on a part of my body I couldn’t touch. On 2014 I decided to aim for a MFA concentrating in poetry, and this time I applied to eleven programs, just to be safe. I realized that this had been what I had really wanted to do all along, and since I had become familiarized with the application steps, I said to myself,

“I need no reverse jinxing. I got this.”

However, March came back like a hungry lion, and immediately I reverse jinxed myself. I latched myself to it almost instinctively. I envisioned myself swimming in rejection letters every time I reached out to open the mailbox. I predicted a sad e-mail and a colorless day every time I turned on my laptop.

Then the first letter finally came. It was from Syracuse. I tucked it into my bag and took it to the Kent District Library at East GR, because I wanted to look at it some place away from home. I remember that Reeds Lake was semi-frozen and that I peered into the letter gingerly. And tada! It was a thank-you-but-no-thank-you letter. I thought (cue: dramatic music), “I’m done for. All the letters are going to be like this.”

Once back home, I called my mom and stoically recited a list of back-up plans in case I did not get into any of the programs. I felt pretty calm. This first letter mentally prepared me for any future disappointments. The reverse jinx, though not fail proof, effectively eased my nervousness and the burden of putting constant effort into thinking happy tidings. Plus, I knew life would not end if I did not get into the program this time either. However, I was starting to wonder what would become of me. I had felt that this time, this had really been it. I shared this to my mom, and midway, she shushed me.

“You sound so old,” she said, “Yeah, like those old men in that story I told you once.”

The story was about a land that suffered from a terrible drought. One day, desperate, the elders of that land decided that they would go to a mountain to pray to God for rain. As they climbed the mountain, they saw amongst them a child who was carrying a bright, red umbrella. Puzzled, they asked him why he had brought his umbrella when there was no rain, and the child replied, “Because I believe God will answer our prayers and make it rain.” Out of all the people there, the child had been the only one who had trusted God would actually answer their prayers.

I gaped and cringed. I gaped, because I was like the elders. I had been a child once too, one who unabashedly, trustingly carried an umbrella around. Now I was but playing “responsible grown-up,” constantly worrying about tomorrows and telling myself to be realistic and prepared for the worst, but not the best.

And I cringed, because the story seemed too good to be true. It was strenuously hard to think that if I simply believed, if I simply pulled out that umbrella again, God would respond. Questions like “What if He does not plan to make it rain? What if God has other plans? How can I know what he wants me to do at all?” had me soaked.

My mind was still oscillating between jinxes and rejection letters, but umbrellas and rain were added to the equation. I felt a conclusion was due, a proper posture for this waiting period. March was not over yet, and I didn’t want to waste it in gloomy thoughts nor in delusions of grandeur.

I arrived to two conclusions.

First, I reckoned that there was no such thing as one form of faith. Faith could be child-like certainty, faith could be serene hope, faith could be hungry desperation, faith could be simple toiling and waiting. Surely God acknowledged each kind of faith particular to every individual. For me, who was never sure about any decision I made in my life and faced many dead ends, I was not like the child in the story with the umbrella at all—my spiritual limbs were too short to be able to take such huge leaps of faith. Instead, I saw I was given small but sturdy, stubborn feet. Yes, mailboxes and e-mails scared me, but I continued to check them attentively, and even with a rejection letter at hand and the fear of impending disappointment, I knew I would try and try again, continue onward with these size five feet, just like after I hadn’t made it into grad school on my first try. This was the form of my faith.

Second, I had been misplacing my faith. My faith had been in the things I wished God did for me, but not in God Himself. Who was I to demand gifts when everything I already had was given to me by grace? From the very start my English language skills, academic capabilities, poetic talent, and such were not things I could be confident about. I had made it so far because I could trust in the desire God planted within me and His goodness.

God does not necessarily answer my prayers in the ways I want him to. Sometimes he withholds. Sometimes he takes away. Yet sometimes he gives. Therefore, what I now open up my umbrella to are these things: God is faithful. God is loving. God is good and works everything for good. Because whether I end up in grad school or somewhere totally unprecedented, at the end of it all, I believe that it will rain more than water. It will rain stars.

***

P.S.

This is an edited version of a reflection I had written for myself on March. One week after Syracuse, I received a call from Bowling Green State saying I was accepted into their program with a full scholarship. I was loitering around Johnny’s, visiting my boyfriend when this happened. I jumped on him and gave him a joyful hug and didn’t care who was looking. By April all the results finished trickling in. I didn’t get into Iowa, Illinois, Boston, and Hunter College. I got accepted into Ohio State, Western Michigan, Eastern Washington, Sarah Lawrence College, and University of Notre Dame.

Once again, I want to thank Calvin’s English Department’s professors for their marvelous guidance and for taking the time to write me recommendation letters (twice for some)!

Ae Hee Lee