I turned 22 on Thursday.
I always get a little sentimental on my birthday. 22 years. It's a lot of years. and it's not a lot of years at all. Connecting the dots on the timeline of my life between birth and this very moment would look very multi-dimensional. I could make you a map, code it, and show you a landscape similar to that of good old California. A long state, fertile bottom land, rich hills, white water, mountains, deep riverbeds, and low black caves. If there was a soundtrack attached, you'd hear some country, some classical, some rap, some broadway, some complete silence. Even in high school, when the soundtrack could mostly be akin to sappy, pathetic Taylor Swift songs, I knew that God was about shaping me. I knew He was my friend.
My younger years were full of identity crises, going from arm to arm desperately looking for approval and acceptance. I pushed myself hard in school, and made grades and achievement my idol. I put on costumes twice a year for twelve years and stepped onto a stage and fit there. I made sense when I got to be someone else for a little while. I went to college and began to discover that life was beautiful. I turned myself inside out, the Spirit moving and shaking. There's been hospital visits. Lots and lots of hospital visits. I've sat in both seats there, and found that one is supremely more comfortable than the other. I've learned that shifting in and out of community can let you know rather quickly where your identity stands. I've learned the hard way that my identity has rested too much on the ebb and flow of relationships and roles. As I lost my ground through periods of heartache and confusion, fear and anger... I watched my friends struggle more and more to know me.
This isn't to say that it's all been negative. Because it sure sure hasn't. It's been wildly beautiful. I am transforming and growing and resting in freedom now more than ever before. Through this season I am learning a good deal about my giftings and how to obey as a steward of Holy Spirit peace and hope. I'm learning what it means to accept grace, to respond to love. I'm learning what it means to be a powerful daughter, with the knowledge that I am destined to become a strong and fierce mother. I'm learning that I've always had the heart of a teacher, learning and digesting while also simultaneously pouring that back out and working that back out with others. I'm a go-tell-it-on-the-mountain girl, through and through. I'm learning that when I find myself in the sun, looking back at the valley below, with ragged breath and excitement I'm also whispering "let me tell you what I've learned." I've been through seasons of great boldness. Seasons where I have been surrounded by ears, clouds of witnesses, and an endless of amount of words to speak. These are my mountaintops. But we can't all stay there forever, can we?
We just keep journeying. We embrace the ebb and flow of seasons and people and emotion.
I'm not in the Valley of the Shadow anymore. Not in this season.
I am happy. I am grateful. I am hopeful. I am free. I am loved.
I have incredible heart friends who walk with me. Through the valleys and the peaks. And no matter the landscape, they call the beauty. They love me where I'm at, in the stage that I'm in. I'm convinced that the ones who will wait with us through the awkward and the unknown are a handful at best. The ones who won't give up and let you off into the silence yet won't coddle you or hold back the trusted wounds are truest rarities. Those are the ones who look like Jesus. Thank you to those of you who have been unendingly by my side.
I jokingly stated the other night that this is the year that I'm going to meet my husband. 22 sounds like the perfect age, the perfect time. I said it to several friends, who joined along and decided to claim that with me. It was silly, really. But it took off quickly. Birthday pictures were posted, and attached was the hashtag "this is the year", in reference to my impending ficticious love story.
I would love to meet my husband this year. But {WAY} more than that, I want to be a woman who stands on mountains and crawls in caves alongside the broken and hurting, the victorious and the triumphant. I want my identity to be deeply rooted in the person of Jesus Christ. Because I can completely trust Him with the landscape of my life. He loves me way before I love Him back. He knows way more about the caves than I do, and He stood on the mountain first.
So, I stand by the original hashtag.
#thisistheyear
It's the year to embrace the fact that the ground will be made level very, very soon. Old and young, rich and poor, healthy and sick, happy and sad. “Every valley will be raised up, and every mountain and hill will be flattened. Uneven ground will become level, and rough terrain a valley plain.” Isaiah 40:4.
It's the year that I will journey with people like never before, in caves and on mountaintops.
And it's the year that I will come to know the love that He has for me like never before.
Cheers to 22. It's going to be the best year yet.
