Milestones

We have company at church. A youth group has arrived to help us clean up some of the mess left by the ice storm. They are a good group, their leadership is organized and easy to work with. They are working hard and really require very little care. Food three times a day, a place to shower, a place to sleep. Not very demanding.

They happened to arrive in my birth week. This time of the year always makes me so reflective about life in general, my life in particular. Not really so much about what it has been about, or even what I have accomplished, but how I see it each year when the anniversay of my birth arrives. I would be much more about accomplishments but once I am done with them, I am truly done. I dont think I could point to many accomplishments outside of my children because most I don't remember, and my children never let me forget.

Our guests are a timely reminder to me that my life has changed significantly since the days when I was a member of a youth group. I was a deeply dissatisfied youth, always digging for the bottom line, always doubtful, always skeptical yet never abandoning the search for something more. I had many friends and I was involved in lots of activities including my church, but I was so hungry for more. More of everything, more love, more time, more stuff, more talent. Like the Greedy in Raggedy Ann, I could never get enough. There is a very pretty young lady with the group who seems, based on the very surface and superficial interaction I have had with her, to be the exact opposite. She seems to be fairly content. Content to work, to content to play, content to talk, content to be quiet. Her younger brother seems to be very much the same. It is no longer a grief to me that I did not have this experience, and every year that I look back I am more filled with gratitude that God is satisfying my soul in new ways all the time. Instead I wonder, where will these two go, when they start so much farther along the journey than I did.

I think I have changed very little on the inside. I am still the same little girl who used to make deals all the time with her siblings to get what she wanted. I am still the "it could never happen to me" teenager who thought I was invincible and nothing major could ever go wrong. I am still the new mother who marveled at the wonder of birth and was stunned that the world didn't stop the day I had a son. I am still the hustling bustling twenty something who cannot understand why everyone who wants something has to get in line in front of me.

The change in me is more about vision. It's more about a shift in the center. I am not far from center, let me be quick to confess. But I am not dead center as I once was. I have begun enoying life a little more because I require from it a little less. My job is just my job, not who I am. My friends are my friends but not my self worth. My children, God bless them, are their own people, not a refection of my hopes and dreams. I see life I hope a little more how God sees life, it is what it is, but not all there is.

I am glad for our visiting clean up crew. They helped me this year celebrate the touch of God in my life, a definte mark that evidences the fruit of the Spirit, alive in me. Thanks be to God.