We were eleven years old when we first met. From a distance, she wasn’t one I envisioned being close with, as she and one of her friends spent time playing imaginary games I could have cared less about. Yet, our paths continued to cross through Girl Scouts, club soccer, and school. And the Lord had plans for that friendship even though I did not know Him at the time. Through it, and the friendship of another, the distinction of what it meant to be a Christian in surrendering my life to Jesus and following after Him was finally made—both through her actions and in her words. We were becoming best friends and then before my eighth grade year, I gave my life to the Lord. Since that day, she has walked faithfully beside me in patience and love, teaching and modeling what it meant to love and follow Him. She folded me into her family where they became as close as my own, and into her life and community of believers who were a refuge I desperately needed. Today, I marvel at how young we were then, yet still able to partly understand the significance of it all.
We grew up together. Countless days and nights were spent upon her bed where we would talk for hours upon hours about what we were thinking and feeling, what our takes were on things that happened (ranging from superficial to deep), and what it would look like when we grew up. We talked about what we envisioned it would look like when we each got married one day. These days and times are graven upon my heart as they were so formative to who I was and who I have become.
When I moved over 1,000 miles away to college, there was an adjustment in our friendship. We no longer had the proximity we had for seven years prior, and so the ebb and flow of our friendship changed. We had to adapt to less talking and more trusting in the fibers of our friendship that had been woven to hold the days to come. She stood beside me on my wedding day, which I couldn’t have imagined anything different. John and I were in Colorado for about 10 months after we got married where she and I were able to resume some of the proximity of our friendship before we moved even further away to New York, where we have now been for 3 years. Yet, when I would return home—even still to this day—we pick up right where we left off, and God has been so good to use and bless our time together.
Three weeks ago, she got engaged to a wonderful man that I do not really know but trust. I received a text message and a picture shortly after it happened, and she made time to Skype with me the next day despite her preparations for leaving for a month of international travel a couple days later. It was a wonderful conversation and I was so blessed by it; yet there was much for me to learn from it.
It’s not what I pictured this time would be. What is happening in reality is different than what we once dreamed about upon her bed in our teens. And I am not there in presence like I was when we were growing up. The reality is that for half of our friendship now, I have lived far away. And in that time, we have both grown and changed and have graciously been provided community around us to fill the presence we were to one another growing up. I should clearly know and recognize this by now, and most days, I do, but on that day and in that conversation, I felt both an overwhelming sense of gratitude for how the Lord has preserved our friendship over the 16 years we have been friends, but also a sense of loss that things aren’t like I pictured they would be—though they are exactly what they should be.
It was a stark reminder that just because things aren’t what we once or presently wish they should be, it doesn’t mean things aren’t currently what they should be. If anything or any relationship in this life is to have longevity, it can’t be forced to remain its own fixed entity for all of time—it has to have the freedom to grow, adapt, and change. If I desire nothing to change and take action upon that, I will either stifle it to its death or will lose it because it cannot be held in that type of bondage. Life is too long and dynamic. The Lord is too great and too sovereign. What can be is greater than what I know now, if I am willing to have clear eyes and heart to see and accept it as the Lord wills and brings it—even if it also brings pain, days of sorrow, and seasons without favor. Nothing is forever except the love and salvation I have in the Lord.
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I celebrated four years of marriage with John two weeks ago. We have now been together for eight and known each other for nine. At 27 years old now, it’s an entire third of my life with him in it! We have grown up together in so many ways, and I am incredibly grateful for it and him. Yet this lesson is convicting within my marriage as well—if I want the longevity of marriage to thrive, I have to allow us both to grow and change, even if it’s into things I didn’t expect. I have to surrender our marriage and him to the Lord daily and trust that what He can do with it and my husband is greater than what I foolishly try to control and conjure. That my eyes and heart would be opened to more as I let go of what I think things might be.
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I am a year into full-time freelancing, and about a year into being part of a church plant here in Brooklyn. Both have brought the initial excitement and challenges, and both have brought the joys and trials that stepping into anything new does. It’s easy to wonder about the sustainability of such a thing when you’re a ways into it, but close enough to the beginning to still have the perspective of how it developed. Yet, you’re still close enough to the beginning that seeing what it looks like down the road and how to plan for it now proves a bit tricky. We’re entering the middles. I read this last year and it has stayed with me:
“And middles are often defined by what they are not: the space, the years in between that which is no longer what came before and that which is not yet what will come later…In the middle game, very little is scripted. The middle game is where creativity begins, where tactical daring and subtlety takes over. In the middle game, everything is open.
There are middles in architecture and design too. I learn that churches of the 14th century middle point style were characterized by lots and lots of windows, whole cathedral walls given over to stained glass and tracery, trifoliate windows insistent with light…the middle of the spiritual life may have many windows, and lots of lots of light, but it will also be a season of winnowing.
Middles might be said to be under-theorized. There is an abundance of work on opening and closure, but very little discussion of…what comes in between. This is obviously because the theory of the middle is taken simply to be the theory of the work as a whole. Beginnings and endings are marked points within the work, but the middle is just the work itself with those points lopped off…there is however, perhaps more to be said.” –Don Fowler
Most of life is the middles—the work itself. And because of that, our framework of how we view and approach endings and beginnings will always evolve. What can be is greater than what I know now, if I am willing to have clear eyes and heart to see and accept it as the Lord wills and brings it—and that involves residing and living in the middles, the ambiguious seasons, trusting that as I labor and trust the Lord, He will help me make of it what it should be, even if it requires loss in the process, an abrupt or delayed ending, or the transition to a new beginning.
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I’m going through another thyroid surgery in less than a week—I had a first five and a half years ago. This has been a year of less than favorable health compared to the couple years prior, and in that, there has been the somber realization that I am guaranteed nothing in this life other than the Lord himself. Am I willing to accept that? What my answer to that question is determines so much of how I will live my life: will I live it in fear of the unknown and potential of declining health, either in the years to come or the inevitability of age? Will I live it in anger or frustration that I have to go through these things? Will I ignore it and push it off to the side and act like that question was never asked so I simply don’t deal with it? Or do I embrace the reality of the answer—that I am guaranteed nothing in this life other than Jesus himself—and let that be more than enough? If I can speak that last answer and live within its meaning, then my heart should be at rest and my joy should be full. Bring what trials this life may, but let it bring more of Jesus in them, and then the blessings that do come—may they be treasured as gifts of His love and reminders of His presence and sovereignty over my life. Nothing is guaranteed. In the years of life the Lord wills for me, its nature of longevity and what that looks like in my life depends on my willingness to allow things to adapt and change.
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“For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, for we do not wish to be unclothed by to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, so that which is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Now the one who has fashioned us for this very purpose is God, who has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come. Therefore, we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. We live by faith, not by sight.” –2 Corinthians 5:1-7
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Nothing is forever except the love, faith, and salvation I have in the Lord.