I Am, You Anxious One.

I moved to France three months ago. Waking up with the Provençal sun each morning, ordering a pain au chocolat at my neighborhood boulangerie, and trying not to trip in the cobblestone streets as I walk to school has become such a bewilderingly normal routine. Humans are better at adjusting than we give ourselves credit for, I think.Miraculously, I get to call this quaint, timid town folded into the French Riviera my home. I get to take its sounds and smells and sunshine-colored stucco walls for granted until December. It has been dreamlike to live here, to eat its bread and explore its cities, to learn its history and see its art.That being said, it is really difficult to be Christian in a blatantly post-Christian country. Transplanted here after living in Wheaton, Illinois (a city reported to have the second most churches per capita in America), I have viscerally felt the disparity. The French government pursues laicite, a concept of separation between religion and state, in all of their policy and law-making. Consequently, all traces of religion have largely vanished from culture, from conversation, from the entertainment industry, and from education.God is not prayed to before meals or after terrorist attacks; as they would have it, He is mostly erased from everyday life. During the first few months of my semester, this reality stole so much sleep from me. I was afraid of the seemingly godless void staring me in the face. I was afraid that God really had succumbed to their pressure and left the country. Walking to school each morning, I'd ask Him, "Where have you gone?"But something remarkable has grown out of the void. I cannot pinpoint a morning or moment when it began, but I have found in myself a revitalized fascination with nature. It is, I think, God's answer to my question. He seeps through His creation. He is not on the hearts or lips of these people (except as an expletive), but the trees are drenched in Him; the mountains pierce through clouds and point toward His throne room, and His divinity colors every sunrise. He is asking me to pay attention to these gentle nudges of His. He is teaching me how to wonder and curing my anxious worries by doing so.A few years ago, I discovered this poem written by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. It has flooded back to me in technicolor recently—as poetry so often does—giving me words for this practice of wonder that God is inculcating in me. In his Book of Hours, Rilke writes this from the perspective of God:

I am, you anxious one. Do you not hear merush to claim you with each eager sense?Now my feelings have found wings, and, circling,whitely fly about your countenance.Here my spirit in its dress of stillnessstands before you, — oh, do you not see?In your glance does not my Maytime prayergrow to ripeness as upon a tree?Dreamer, it is I who am your dream.But would you awake, I am your will,and master of all splendor, and I growto a sphere, like stars poised high and still,with time’s singular city stretched below.

The wind gets knocked out of me every time I read that. I feel utterly unfit to follow prose of that caliber with any words of my own. But there are two things I want to say in closing:First, France needs revival. It needs restoration. And the Church here, the proud and the few, need our prayers. My heart pounds in expectation for God to restore these people and reach them with His everlasting arms. With confidence and compassion, pray boldly for that.Second, anxiety flees when God's people learn to wonder. He is our Dream, our Will, our Master of splendor; He "rushes to claim us with each eager sense." And when we use our hands and eyes and ears to meet God in His creation, the anxiety that once begged the question, "Where have You gone?" dissolves. It has to. Increased wonder is the death of fear. Let's wage war against anxiety in wonder and in faith that "I am" is standing before us. He hovers over "time's singular city," shaping time and space for His glory and our good.words by Delaney Young and photo by Cate Willis