I turn 50 in 3 days.
I had big plans to write for 50 days leading up to the birthday. Big ideas. Lots of creativity happening – in my spaghetti brain. But then I missed the start date, by many days. So I decided to start at 30 days out – you know, one month and all. Nope. Then 21 days. Any guesses as to how it went? Of course, you can see the last date of a blog post. So no luck again.
Life is good right now. I have plenty I’d love to write about. But I seriously haven’t had the time.
Finally I am forcing myself to write at 3 days out. Ala rocket ship launch. 3, 2, 1, and all that jazz.
Most I want to be gratitude posts. All of the millions of people who have been instrumental at me arriving at 50 stronger and wiser and moderately sane. No laughing.
This week, I’m looking at the crazy things that happened in the past decade.
Three surgeries (a knee, a gallbladder, and a lumpectomy).
Three schools for the kids (thankfully only one for 8 of those 10 years!).
Three hurricanes (Harvey in Houston, Laura and Delta at the farm).
Six national parks (Yosemite, Big Bend, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, ONSR).
Ten more wedding anniversaries and triplet birthdays and years of sports teams (the number of which I absolutely cannot count now).
Two jobs.
One dog, one cancer diagnosis, one more trip to Disney, one house.
I. Am. Enormously. Grateful.
As a words girl, I find myself looking at the friendships and the gifts and the promotions and the stability of this life and being rendered speechless.
I looked at Bray tonight after a discussion of some drama that had happened recently and said, “Hey, thanks for hanging in there. I know I’m a lot. And you just stick it all out. The craziness. I’m so thankful.”
I know this next decade won’t be without its challenges. We’ll lose the kids to college (which is all we’ll say about that, lalalala), and we’ll lose loved ones and we’ll have unexpected twists and turns, but man are their good people in my life to help navigate.
And my faith, which has experienced a bit of a roller coaster post-cancer, still buoys me. I had a mourning period after I got through all that where I allowed myself to drift away from my Anchor. Then I left my job at Exxon and the monthly bible studies there. Then my weekly discipleship group disbanded because of moves and schedule shifts. Finally we left our church of 16 years in January and have been visiting new churches around town.
But still.
There’s never been a time, over these 10 years, when I haven’t known God was near. When I haven’t trusted His hand was in the middle of all the things. Even when I drifted, He never did. And as I approach this next decade, I trust Him more now. Even with all the hard we have seen. Maybe because of it.
So here we go.
Countdown on.
Leave a Reply