In dependence.

It's a still night, crisp and cool. Leaf nor curtain offer even a twitch, but it's not a muggy stillness like late August. A firework goes off, then a car alarm. Two people talk as they pass under my window, unaware that I can hear them. A baby cries. All the windows on the block are open, drawing in breath from the darkness. All the sounds of the city drift in on a smooth current of sound as pleasing as ocean waves.

The city is a mechanism, a human machine. I've seen its power in a the lights that turn on in the skyscrapers at sundown. And I've seen glimpses of its fragility as well, in the eyes of the people who make it strong, in their doubts and worries.

This is my second summer in Chicago, the heartland metropolis. I've lived here exactly a year and a half at the end of this week.

Looking back on expectations, I laugh like Sarah must've laughed a second time, not when God promised her Isaac and she laughed at Him, but when years later she looked back on her unbelief and subsequent journey and laughed at herself. Maybe she didn't laugh, but I can only imagine that she did.

I did not have realistic expectations. I claimed then to have none at all, but there are little expectations that go unspoken. I was going to remain single. I was going to stay only until I was ready for grad school. I wouldn't second-guess who I was, who God was, or what I was supposed to do about it all. And for all that, now I laugh.

Not a bitter or cynical laugh, just a laugh at the sureness I had that I knew what I was getting myself into when I took the big step into unknown. Of course I wasn't sure of many things, but those things were just the tip of the iceberg.

I had little concern for money. It didn't influence how I made decisions. I had little concern for friends. Not in that I did not love them, but moving away puts a huge burden on a friendship that I did not fully anticipate. Also I did not consider how difficult it could be to make new friends in a new city.

I do not regret my choices. I love this city (most of all on cool summer nights, and least of all on cold winter ones). I'm just having another moment of gazing at the stars through the smoky, post -independence day haze, and wondering if I would see them differently from another place, down a road I did not choose.

I'm just another city dweller, passing through. I came here to be independent, to live the big city life. Chicago sees plenty of these, ambitious twenty-somethings trying to reach for the stars. To do good for humanity or do good for ourselves, and to clamor the tower of success regardless. Because you never know what you could be until you try, and this place, with all its progress, invites us with open arms to be and to become. And we become this city and its proudest accomplishments. No one is really independent. Because to be great, grand, successful, and strong is to be dependent on what created you.

God created me, and I create a little part of this city to look like Him. That puts things into perspective and makes it all seem a little less overwhelming.