things I should've known

WARNING: This is a major brain-dump - just a long, disorganized blob of thoughts I have been mulling over for the past few weeks. Don't feel obligated to read or care - I just needed to process it all in writing.

After a solid eight weeks of madness, of flying and driving back and forth across continents and national borders and state lines, I've finally had a few days of quiet to begin what is for me a long, slow task of processing it all.

And when I say "it all," I don't just mean the things I've seen and memories I've made in the past eight weeks. That would be easy. But that's not how my mind works. No, I mean going back as far as five, ten summers ago, to the things I saw and the memories I made even then, good and bad, because these are all part of what has built me and changed me and taught me things I probably should've known a long, long time ago.

For some reason God made me a long-term thinker, a life-time processor of the moments and wounds and smiles and memories that have made up my twenty-three years.

I imagine I'll still be learning things from these twenty-three years when I'm ninety-three and counting - things I probably should've already known, but that's not how my mind works.

I read somewhere that we have the capacity to carry associations with specific seasons or months out of the year based on (traumatic?) life events that happened in that season or month, even if it was years and years ago.

I think it's true, because there's something about July and August for me - something about the sunlight and the hard shadows across the grass, the deep blue sky and hot dry air and the memories. They still choke me up, still play out in my mind as vividly as if they were happening now: the grit-teeth pain of pulling away from the people I was closest to, preparing to take a wild leap that I honestly didn't know if I was strong enough for, letting God take my life and break it and bend it and re-shape it into something utterly unlike what it was before. And it wasn't just one summer, it was two - two back-to-back Julys and Augusts.

And ever since, I think I have tiptoed through July and August on edge, bracing myself for a leap that (probably) isn't coming, but that I somehow still sense impending upon me.

Things I should've known: There's no such thing as a clean categorization of what's past, what's present, and what's future. They all intermix messily, they all have the power to influence each other and the person I am in any given moment is equal parts of all three. We think of ourselves traveling a straight and narrow timeline from birth until death, but I wonder if it's not more like climbing a mountain in which you have to add a rock to your pack every mile, and the trail conditions ahead are ever-changing. The farther you get, the heavier your load, but the heavier your load, the stronger you become - and all the while, the unknowns of the weather and the condition of the trail ahead of you could alter everything.

Moving on.

This summer, even though (as always) we swore we'd keep it restful, we packed in more trips, activities, and vacations than ever. We spent three different weekends with family and friends at the lake house; I made a lightning trip to Washington, D.C. and the next day we started our 1,700-mile roadtrip/camping trip to Alberta and back. We also spent our usual week in Montana and I have a trip to San Diego still on the horizon to see my sister.

There's been little rest for body or soul. In between trips, Sam has been working double shifts (and more) so we've really only seen each other while on vacation, which has been weird and frustrating at times. We've already started talking about making 2018 our "vacation from vacations" year. This, from a person who wants to see as many square feet of the world as her lifetime will allow.

Things I should've known: Travel and adventure and a week here, a week there are fun and exciting, but they don't fulfill. They give pretty pictures and something to show off on Instagram, but the richness of life is made of the in-between and the ordinary. I don't look back on my twenty-three years and see my trip to Israel as the two weeks that have defined my life (even though they were awe-inspiring and I loved every minute). No, I see the long summer days and golden sunlight of eastern Washington where I grew up, the shadowy blue mountain on the western horizon and the irrigation water sparkling on the orchardgrass. I smell horses and hay and sheep, and I see myself becoming - becoming an animal lover, a hard worker, a thinker, a finder of beauty, a worshiper of God.

I see Florida's palm-studded horizon and billowing white clouds, and smell the creaky old interior of the dorm. I hear the voices of eleven other disciples that I came to love and I see myself poring over the Scriptures, learning to know them and love them as the message of my God: "This is who I AM."

And I see the sunlight creeping across my lime-green bedroom walls and the brightly colored quilt I made, the beginning of a new day with my husband. Just ordinary - house work, yard work, exercise and cat-snuggling. And the richness of life is here, too.

Not in a far away place, somewhere in the future or the past.

Here. Now.

I should've known - now is all I have, all I'm guaranteed. If I love my visions of the future and my pipe dreams more than this moment, that I can see and smell and hear and touch and enjoy, then I will live with dissatisfaction and regret and distance from God who has gifted it to me.

So I'm trying to enjoy the quiet when it's here. I'm going on walks in the mornings when the sun is blazing above the trees and breathing deep and listening to podcasts that make me think - think about key Hebrew words, about the weird and confusing parts of the early chapters in the Bible, about how to embrace hard things and self-development, about how to distinguish between truth and falsehood in so many ways.

Things I should've known: the truth is that we are all born broken. We weren't born intact and then slowly battered and wounded by our circumstances or by the people around us - no, if someone has hurt us it's only because they found the place that had already been aching since the day we were born. Because what was the fall of man, if not the beginning of the wound that would brand all of humanity - the painful awareness of who we really are and the fear that it isn't enough? "I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid myself" (Genesis 3:10b).

And just like Adam and Eve, we long to cast blame for the pain on someone else, but in truth, the wound was already there. The wound has always been there. And we all have it. It's no one else's fault that we hurt - we were born already in pain and fear, and the process of growing up and growing old is the process of seeking healing - sometimes in all the wrong places.

I should've known - no person or event or object can heal this wound; people and circumstances and things can only numb the pain. True healing is in the truth of who God is, and in letting His character shed light on who I am and who I was created to be.