By Courtney Jordan | Courthology.com
Do you ever wake up — not just rise, not simply stir — but wake… into the weight of your own existence?
Not just alive.
Not merely breathing.
But aware.
Present in a room, in a city, on a street you did not choose. Present in a body stitched by generations you never met. And you ask yourself, not for the first time — why here? Why now? Why me?
Science will tell you the how — conception, chromosomes, cells dividing in secret. But it cannot answer the deeper ache: the why.
Why this name?
Why this mind?
Why this quiet war within me?
I walk through my neighborhood, through boardrooms and sanctuaries, past storefronts and fields, and I see people who fit. Like puzzle pieces with smoothed edges, they click into their environments. The way they speak. The way they sit in their own skin. They belong.
And then I glance at myself — sometimes in a mirror, sometimes through the silence that follows me like a second soul — and I think… I was not meant to be here.
Romans 8:22 says, “For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.”
And I groan too.
Not because I do not love. I love deeply.
Not because I have no blessings. I have more than I deserve.
But because there is something in me — in us — that remembers Eden… and knows this isn’t it.
There are days I crave everything. Beauty. Meaning. Clarity. A place where I don’t feel like a trespasser in my own life.
And then there are days I crave nothing at all.
Is it madness to live between those two extremes?
Or is it the mark of having tasted the divine… and still waking up human?
I have sat at tables with kings. I’ve shared meals in huts made of mud. I’ve flown over oceans and still felt the weight of home like a collar too tight around my neck. I have known laughter that echoed like psalms. I have known silence that could suffocate.
And still, I ask: Why here? Why not born into better peace? Better genetics? A different fire in my blood?
Psalm 139 tells me I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Yet I fear what I’ve been made for.
And I wonder if “wonderful” applies when you don’t want the life you’ve been called to.
Still, I believe. I believe not because I always feel God — but because I’ve felt what it’s like to live without Him. And I will never go back.
So I write this not as a conclusion, but as a confession:
I do not always belong to this world.
But I was sent here.
And perhaps that is the holiest kind of presence — not comfort, not perfection — but obedience in the midst of uncertainty.
Maybe I am not lost.
Maybe I am just early to the revelation.
And maybe, just maybe, the ache is proof that I’m alive in the ways that matter most.
—
“My soul is cast down within me; therefore I remember You…”
— Psalm 42:6 (ESV)