So I'm at Starbucks and there's a girl rambling at the counter . . .

about how excited she is that she just made a 102 on her history test. She goes on and on about herself and how happy she is. Great, I guess. She then describes that she is going to go home and take a nap. Then she is going to do some reading . . .

I knew exactly what she was going to say. Not because I'm a genius or something, though I might be. But I have heard this conversation play out time and time again, every since I, too, was in college. She is trying to "find herself." This is something I did in college and something that all college students do. The lie that our culture (modern, postmodern, or whatever the heck you want to call it) presents is that we will go off to college, find ourselves there, then live out the rest of our lives in a cozy job out of this system that we found ourselves in in college.

College can be a great time to "find ourselves." But if that is the last time that we attempt to put a marker on who we are, what we believe -- our system -- then what a boring, dull life we have ahead of us. I think our culture lies, or at least it has lied to me, when it leads us to believe that we will be able to lead a good life, an enjoyable life, once we live out of a sense of having found ourselves. I don't think we will ever completely find ourselves, just as we will never completely find God. God is, as Elizabeth Johnson terms it, "divine incomprehensibility." There's a sense that we ourselves are incomprehensible, too. We need to use things like psychology to help us gain a sense of who we are. But God's good story teaches us that God, not humans, are the main characters in life.

"Observe how the lillies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin."