Champagne Wishes
From Wikipedia: One’s golden birthday, also called a champagne birthday, is the day when the age one turns and the date of birth coincide.
Thirty on the 30th!
The Door to Thirty
Tomorrow I turn 30. Thirty. It seems weird to think of myself as 30, as I feel about 25 and I still get carded just about everywhere I go. (I got carded probably five times a day when I was in Vegas – even a few times for just being on the floor, even when I wasn’t gambling.) But regardless of how I feel, there it is: 30.
Everyone keeps telling me that your thirties is when it all comes together, and you realize that you were an idiot in your twenties (I already realized that), and that the thirties are the prime of your life. It’ll be great, they tell me. And while I believe them, there is still that sense of sadness that I’m closing the door on such a huge part of my life. I won’t be a 20something anymore and that is just strange to me.
My high school Precal was that cool teacher guy whom everyone loved: Mr. Rock. I don’t remember any math he taught me, but I remember very clearly one Friday afternoon (it must have been his birthday), and as he stood there at the chalkboard in his casual Friday jeans and LSU polo, he told us that no matter the number of candles on your cake, you never really feel old. That statement is hard to understand when you’re 17 and think you’re already old enough to know everything, but I get it now.
I’m excited about tomorrow. I feel like I’m getting ready to open the biggest present I’ll ever get and the anger that I felt several weeks ago over entering into a new decade has totally dissipated. I feel an energy around me, like major things are about to happen, as if my life is about to change in a way I never expected.
I did a lot in my 20s: I graduated from college; I landed three jobs; I moved many times, including the biggest move of my life to the Dirty, Dirty; I bought a house; I fell in love and got my heart broken and then I did that again and again and again; I got Montego and found out my brother is having a son; I learned to believe in what I always knew to be True and I let myself be loved by the greatest Lover to ever live. I stopped looking for answers in the darkness and found the answer to every question I’ll ever ask. (Last night I made a joke and said something like, “I’m just over here trying to love Jesus!” and my friend looked at me funny and said, “But lovin’ Jesus is easy. There ain’t nothin’ complicated about Him,” and that is the truth.)
The only emotion I can muster at this moment is gratitude. I am so, so thankful for everything in my life. I have friends who think I’m one-of-a-kind and who tolerate my abuse of Birthday Week. I have a supportive family who love me lavishly. I feel like my life has been blessing piled on top of blessing and I did nothing to deserve any of it. I’m simply a girl, a woman, who’s over here just trying to love Jesus. Who is trying to love you. Who is trying to love her life.
The door to 30 stands open and whether I like it or not, I’m walking through it. I’ll see y’all over there.
Control
I am a very undisciplined person – always have been. When I was a freshman in high school, I got dropped from honors Biology because I couldn’t be bothered to do my homework. My teacher even called me at HOME and told me that if I wanted to go back and do my assignments retroactively, she would give me partial credit and that would be enough to keep me in her class. I opted not to. The second semester of my senior in college, I took a ballet class pass/fail and though it was only 2 credit hours, I needed every credit hour in my schedule in order to graduate. For some reason I took some moral high ground (that was spurred by laziness) on doing written work (“I took this class to DANCE!”) and even though I thought I had figured out the numbers in my head, my lack of written work earned me a failing grade. This meant I had to take summer school in order to get those two extra credit hours. I walked with the rest of my class in May, but my name was in the program with a big, fat asterisk next to it. My mom was thrilled with that, I assure you.
I have a workout calendar pinned to my bulletin board at work, and more often than not I look at it, shrug and go home instead. I like to do what I like to do, and it’s very difficult for me to discipline myself to do life’s unenjoyable, but necessary, tasks.
I think this is a fairly typical human condition, but most people, by adulthood anyway, have figured out this very obvious fact of life – sometimes you gotta do things you don’t want to, but need to. Which is why I am still tot tally surprised that God has called me to do ANYthing. I’m not the good Christian who sits down every morning for her devotionals or who is diligent about keeping up with a prayer calendar or journal writing. When the mood strikes, sure. When I’m in need of something, absolutely. But I don’t pray in a disciplined, regimented way. Of course I believe that it’s good to be in a constant conversation with God, it’s also good to let your will be bent. To let go of control. To stop being so stubborn and lazy. When we are broken, we are rebuilt. When we are stretched, we get stronger.
Those lessons are tough for me.
Last night someone asked me (in a random way) what I would do for a Klondike Bar and I said that I didn’t like them. “Do you like ice cream?” he asked. Of course. “Do you like chocolate over vanilla ice cream?” Of course! “But you don’t like Klondike Bars?” And I told him that I needed to have a handle, like a Drumstick or something of that ilk. “Oh,” he replied. “It’s a control thing.”
And it socked me in the gut because it IS a control thing. I like to be in charge, even when I’m eating ice cream.
I don’t like relinquishing – letting go gives me hives – and there have been many a battle of wills between me and my God over who is in charge of my life. I will always remember my twenties as a time when I fought with Him, sometimes to the death of parts of my sprit. And I can’t adequately explain to you the peace and joy I feel now that I have given up fighting Him so hard. Of course I will always struggle – He made me this stubborn, this willful for a reason – but that struggle now has a context and a purpose. It’s to grow me, to stretch me, to teach me that I don’t know best and I certainly don’t know everything. I know almost nothing.
“Sometimes I think of where it is I’ve come from
And the things I’ve left behind
But of all I’ve had, what I possessed
Nothing can quite compare
With what’s in front of me ”
Mountain of God – Third Day
The Week Ends
Staying a little late at work tonight because I’m going next door to b.e.d. to meet some friends for happy hour. How do you invite someone to go to that restaurant? “Would you like to go to b.e.d.?” Maybe that’s the point.
My mother and stepfather drove back to Ohio on Thursday, and I already miss her like crazy. As do Montego and my yard. She did an amazing amount of work at my house, and my yard has never looked better. The previous owner put in some pretty decent landscaping, but I had let some of it go a bit, and she whipped it all back into shape and it looks beautiful. Now I want to get a rocking chair and put it on my porch and actually enjoy having a yard – like I live in Mayberry, which isn’t too far a descriptor for my little inside-the-perimeter municipality.
Just got a text that says “now,” so I guess that means it’s time for happy hour to begin.
It’s the weekend, it’s summer and it’s my birthday month. Things don’t get much better.
Warfare
It has hit me with incredible force that in less than a month I will be in Romania, and to be honest with you, I am scared to death. I have about 60 percent of my funds, and pledges for a little more, and even though I know that it’s fruitless to worry about it and that it’s not in my hands, I worry anyway. We got our flight schedules and we’re flying Carpatair from Stuttgart, Germany to Timisoara and my booked seat on some generic mini-airline has given me something else to focus my nervous energies on.
A few of the other people on my team are actual teachers and sometimes in our meetings as they discuss learning philosophies and education theories, I feel wholly out of place. But then I remember that I have two hands and two feet and willingness to serve however I am needed and I get over myself.
We met on Sunday night at the main NPCC campus, tucked away in a little room across from the auditorium, the church dark after the high schoolers filed out, finished with their small groups and worship for another week, and talked more about our plan of action for the short week we’ll be in Timisoara. I took the minutes, filling my notebook with all of our ideas and questions, and I tried not to be overwhelmed by it all. As we were wrapping up, our leader said that she just wanted to mention it briefly, as we would discuss it more at our retreat this weekend, but as we get closer and closer to our go date, we should all be aware of the spiritual warfare that surrounds us. While I think the idea of Frank Peretti style spiritual warfare is better left to the fiction aisle, I do believe that evil is a real force and that if you let him, the devil will sink his hooks in you so deep, you may never shake him loose. And I wondered if perhaps that was why I was feeling so out of sorts lately. I had chalked it up to post-meeting, post-beach blues but maybe it’s deeper than that. Maybe it’s darkness trying to worm into my heart, trying to make me feel useless and unworthy of such an adventure; trying to make me feel as though maybe God made an judgment in error choosing me for this task.
Most days I accept that while I will always be a sinner saved by grace, I’m still a pretty decent person. A person who holds the door and smiles at strangers and would do anything for a friend. But some days, the knowledge that I am a whore and a thief and a liar is the only knowledge my head will hear. It drowns out the rest: the knowledge that I am loved despite all of those things; that I can never lose my salvation; that even the depth and width of the ocean is nothing compared to the depth and width of God’s love and desire for me. So, I do what I’ve been taught. I pray. I read scripture. I remind myself of the things that need reminding. I picture myself as a three-year-old girl, who stomped the floor and told the devil to go back from whence he came.
But he’s a sneaky creature, that devil, and sometimes he’ll find a way in, even when you’re doing your best to keep him out.
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Compassion
