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How to have a truly happy new year.

For the first time in years, I don’t remember my New Year’s resolution from January. Usually, I write it down in my journal or on a note I stick to my mirror. There’s been many of those dog-eared sticky notes from years past. The year of contentment. Speaking life. We passed pancakes across the breakfast table on January 1st this year. “What do you want from 2018?” I can’t remember my answer. I know what I didn’t want though. I didn’t want to walk into her office and share the parts of my life I’m inclined to hide. I didn’t want to Facetime her the day after she delivered her baby that never breathed. I didn’t want to spend four months wondering how I’d walk into her house on Christmas day and see her empty chair. I didn’t want to go on another first date that led nowhere. We sit across from each other in a little coffee shop in Colorado, picking at a charcuterie board. “When I think about all of the things I have left to go through,” her voice cracks....

When Time Runs Out and Your Bucket List is Full

I think birthdays are reminders that the clock keeps turning. It's grey today, the clouds layered together above the dark brown trees, leafless. I remember Novembers like this and not like this all the way back to when my memory started. Somehow, while I was dragging a sled that was too heavy for me up that little ramp on the farm that we called a hill, sometime when I was sprawled out on the trampoline under a canopy of August stars with my best friend, sometime when I was standing at the top of a mountain trying to reach for a piece of the sky, sometime...it ended and slipped away. Everything is in pictures now or in pictures that we never took.

Tomorrow I turn twenty. I didn't go to Ecuador and work in an orphanage, but I stayed in Canada and sat on the edges of bunks and prayed with First Nations' kids before I hugged them goodnight. I didn't write a Christian book for teenagers that changed the lives of millions, but I stood up with three friends, heart hiccuping, and told my youth group, just thirty of them, how God said He was big enough to use the weak to change the world.  I didn't go to university right after high school because I didn't have enough credits, but I went to a Bible School where the Rocky Mountains outlined the sunset, and I realized I could say 'no' to sin.

Isn't this how it goes? God uses our moments in the way we'd least expect.

My list is full and my bucket is empty. Nothing went as planned.

I am perfectly happy.


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