I turned 30 yesterday. It's a number that feels good and right to me. I'm not sorry to see my 20's go, and as I like to say, I'm really just aging into my personality :)
This occasion was marked with some really sweet surprises, the best of which was 30 notes Mark had gathered from people who have been significant in my life over the years. I read them slowly and drank in the goodness of God expressed through these friends and family.
A favorite writer of mine, Lore Wilbert, turned 40 this year, and she has a habit of reflecting on each decade with a gratitude list. I decided to adopt the practice today, and it was so meaningful for me I thought I'd share it. Tried to move through my life sequentially, so here goes...
I am grateful to be born in December. It suits me, I think. My appreciation for it has grown as I have, although my parents say I've loved the cold since I was little.
I'm grateful for my family, for parents who are committed to each other and to us kids. For so long I took this for granted, not realizing it was something remarkable to stay together and to choose to love each other for life. Now I know, and I'm grateful.
I'm grateful that from a young age, my interests were nurtured, and I was given space to find out who I was.
I'm grateful that life in community was modeled for me as a kid. I learned what it was to open our home, to share our lives with others. I mostly remember the fun, but I later learned of the difficulties and pain that were walked through together too.
I am grateful to have been discipled by the lives and faith of so many (though namely, my parents). To bear witness to true religion-- not believing just the right things and seeking behavior modification, but deep, ordinary faithfulness. Truly walking with God and with others. I found it to be so beautiful that I couldn't not desire it for my own life.
For the gift of all of my grandparents in my life, all these 30 years. For their presence and support of me from the beginning, and especially for their prayers over me.
I'm grateful for playfulness and humor, which were always present in our home. I laugh easily because I've been laughing for as long as I can remember, and it has been good medicine in the midst of hard things.
I am grateful for friendships that carried me through years that could've been unbearably awkward and lonely (hello, middle-high school).
I'm grateful for college years at Truman, for learning to make our own fun in small town Missouri.
For the friends I met during those college years, who helped me make sense of the world and of life in that formative season. And also for the roommates who celebrated the small things, like weekly living room sleepovers just because! we! can!
I'm grateful to have met Mark when I did. We were still kids with so much to learn, but we wanted to do it together. Zero regrets for not having my life more "together" before getting married.
I am in awe of God's creativity and kindness in leading Mark to propose to me at Rock Bridge State Park in Columbia. At the time, we had no idea what Columbia would come to mean to us. We didn't live here and had no plans to ever live here. Each time I hike at Rock Bridge now (which is often), I am grateful.
I'm grateful for the ways we learned to depend on each other in those early years of marriage, in a new place, and a drastically different season. It was good for us.
I am grateful to have quickly found a church home in Louisville, and soon after, the small group that we spent nearly 4 years with. These were formative years, and formative friendships.
I'm grateful for seminary, which taught us to lose some of our theological rigidity and showed us an unexpected path forward in ministry.
I am even grateful for those painful years of early adulthood-- all that fumbling around and doubting myself was leading to something.
I'm amazed at the Spirit's leading of our hearts to desire to be a part of a church plant in a college town, which lead to a surprising conversation with the Linnemans, that turned into one of our easiest, best "Yes" moments.
I'm grateful for a place that felt like home so quickly, and for the gift of sharing a town with our siblings for those first few years.
I am grateful for Trinity Community Church, in every form it has taken since we began. It has never been clearer to me that the church is the body of Christ. I've been formed by our desire to grow slow and deep. I'm moved constantly by the ways people serve and grow and give of themselves. It's beautiful.
I'm grateful for the stir of our hearts toward foster care. This, in many ways, is what shook me from emotional numbness and pain avoidance.
I am so grateful that, through foster care, we discovered what it is to parent, to love children who are not "ours." I am grateful for every ounce of heartache, because these children are so worth loving.
I can now say I am grateful for the darkness of that year as we fostered. I sunk to the depths here. We had to learn how to ask for and receive help. AND we were met with God's sustaining love and power. We had friends lean in close through our tears and pain and it meant everything to us.
I'm immensely grateful for my year of deep internal work after the kids left our care. For the time and space to process all that we'd experienced. And for eyes to see what it meant for me: At my lowest and my worst, I am deeply loved and safe and held by God. Believing and grasping hold of this has changed everything for me.
I'm grateful that I've been growing more into myself ever since, accepting all that I am not, embracing what I actually am and seeing it as a gift. I've found so much freedom here.
I am grateful for the opportunity to be in the lives of young adults who are navigating the transition out of school and into adulthood. To ease that transition with community at the center has been sweet.
I'm grateful to now share adulthood with both of my younger brothers, to see and delight in who they've become. I'm grateful that my family are friends, too. I love them and I also like them a lot.
I am grateful for my Year of the Trail, which turned out to be a crazy 2020. I couldn't have known, but God did. These trails became another home, a place to breathe and be. Sometimes my racing thoughts didn't slow, but many others I experienced calm and took in beauty, and I never regretted going outside.
I'm grateful to be learning that prayer is not a means to an end. Rather, it is an invitation to ongoing communion with the Lord. I'm grateful for the courage to begin to pray more boldly, with wild hope.
I'm grateful for those who have labored to write words that have nourished me, have become a part of me. Specifically, for those faithful writers who do not seek the spotlight, but have lived stories that sing of what God has done.
I am grateful for unexpected new work this year, birthed from gifts and desires that have long been in me. It is weighty and wonderful to walk alongside others in the valley, to hold their hurts, to watch them change, to celebrate growth. What a gift!
If you took the time to read this, I'm grateful for you, too. Cheers to getting older and softer and seeing with new eyes all that God has done.
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