I feel like I have been waiting my whole life for my life to get started.
Can anybody else relate?
I was waiting to get out of school so I could become an independent woman and go to college. Then, I was waiting for my boyfriend to propose so I could plan our wedding. Then, I was waiting on the military to give us a date so I could figure my life out. Then I was waiting to get life sorted before I got a job so I could feel like I was a part of the team....
Waiting, and waiting, and waiting.
I almost feel like I was so consumed with waiting, that I completely missed everything else. I felt so stuck...
Until one day, just a short while ago, I woke up and felt like I had arrived. I don't know what happened, or what changed. I just felt home. I looked around and I realized that all of the things I had been waiting for, praying for, and dreaming of, had all come true and I was sitting in the sweetest spot known to man. I felt so overwhelmingly thankful and blessed. What a great God I serve!!
Do you ever think about where you are in life, and the map of tiny perfect moments that happened perfectly to get you where you are? I do. The other day I was thinking about how I met my husband.
When I was 7 or 8, my parents had just moved us into a new house on a big plot of land. Our closest neighbors were a really nice older couple that lived a half a mile off the road from us. A short while after that, their grandkids came to visit, from Russia! That is where I met my long time friend, Rachel. Eventually, Rachels family decided to move to America to be closer to her grandparents. They chose a small town outside of Spokane. That is where she wound up going to school with a boy named Billy Wisor.
How insane is it that all of those things happened so perfectly. If my parents had waited to move in, if Rachels parents found a better home, somewhere else. The smallest, most fragile detail could have changed, but that's not how God wrote the story!
I had waited so long to find a life long friend, and God delivered two! One was just a little belated. Thank goodness though, because if my husband had met me in Junior High, I think he would have thought I was too crazy to touch.
I know this all seems a little scattered, but I promise I have a point.
God fills our lives with a map of tiny, perfect moments. He 100% has a plan for our lives, and I didn't grasp that until the other morning when I woke up, and I realized that I had reached all the goals I've been longing for. You have to understand though, I was feeling so lost and pointless. Like, I had lived my whole life, I had put in the hours I needed to, and I didn't feel like I was home. I felt like I had done all of the right things, listened to God, and followed His will, so why was I still feeling so low and hopeless?
I was waiting.
I thought that there would be a notification system that somehow alerted me when I had reached my goal, so I could celebrate it. That sort of feels like missing the point though, right? You don't know joy until you feel sorrow, its all about the journey... bla bla bla. Having an angel tap on your shoulder and whisper "you've arrived! You can relax and celebrate now" feels like driving like a crazy person with a blindfold on, and then your GPS letting you know that you arrived safely.
So I just kept waiting, waiting to feel like I had "arrived" to my life. "Things are perfect now, I can wake up and start living." Waiting left me resentful, left me feeling out of control and sad, it left me feeling alone. How disrespectful that my boyfriend didn't know I was waiting on him. How disrespectful that the military didn't know I was waiting on them. How disrespectful that that job didn't know I was waiting on them. Nobody respects me or my time. Nobody cares about me or my time...
Yet in all of those periods of waiting, I had arrived at each goal I had hoped for. I was in college! I was engaged! I had gotten the truck of my dreams! I was married! I lived 15 minutes from the beach. I was taking all of those things for granted, a passive "thanks God" and on to praying for a new level to unlock.
Its all of those small, perfectly placed, seemingly innocent moments, like meeting your best friend, that make life so flavorful and delightful. I'm just so glad that I realized that! I'm excited for the day my husband comes home from deployment, but I am not waiting. I am excited for the day that I have my very own mini versions of my husband and I, but I am not miserably waiting.
Now, that's not to say that I will never go through a crappy season again. Another season of anxious waiting, of fear, or pain... I am saying that my whole life wont be devoted to those things, like it has been in the past. Sometimes, its in the painful moments that the tiny perfect ones show up, like a flower poking out of the pavement on the road. I want to better appreciate where I am in life, as opposed to pushing it all aside and asking "okay what's next"
This is exactly where I wanted to be, and I don't want to miss what the Lord has for me. So I am going to celebrate today, and tomorrow, and all the days ahead of me. I will work in excited anticipation for the future, but I am done waiting, missing out of all of my small, perfect moments <3
