A Lifetime Ago

That girl in the picture there, that was me once. A clueless eighteen year old without a care in the world. 

Sometimes I forget what it was like back then. Not that it was all that long ago, but it sure seems like a lifetime to me.

Time is a strange thing, isn't it? We wake up day after day, and slowly those days turns to months, and the months into years. Before we know it fine wrinkles begin gathering at the corners of our eyes. Smiling lines that crinkle up, to never smooth out again. 

People come and go, phases pass, opportunities present themselves. We change. Oh how we change. Slowly God takes our rough molds and if we allow it, smooths us into the beautiful sculptures he intends us to be. 

But all that takes time, and time moves like molasses, so slow that we hardly even notice we're moving at all. Until one day we wake up and realize just how far we have come.

"I've already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be." - Joan Didion

I think I've lost touch with that girl. She was much different than myself. Naive, carefree, dreamy, rose colored glasses type of a girl.

I still wear those rose lenses though, but maybe with a lot more caution. Truth be known I'm no longer dreamy - I'm realistic. Not naive, but anxious. Not carefree, but a perfectionist. The whimsical ways of my youth changed by the weights of adulthood.

I don't long to be that same girl again. No, I've learned too much, grown too much. I don't condone longing for what is passed and gone, and I love the person I am now. However there are some valuable lessons to be learned from our prior selves. I think I'd like to recapture that dreamer I used to be, not worry quite as much. Let life flow in its natural current, rather than trying to swim against it. Allowing the story to unfold as it may.

I'm old enough now to realize our lives don't fit the perfect molds we fashion in our minds, in fact things rarely work out as we plan them to. That's all good though. God watches over us, he's the real author to our stories after all, and I trust him more with the pen than I'd trust myself. 

Of course we always have our agency. We're not required to choose certain paths or go certain ways, but I believe there are better ways than others, and I do believe that God has certain things in mind for us. That's why we've got to learn to go with the current, and allow God to be the driver in our lives. He knows the way. Proud man says otherwise, surely I've been guilty of that way of thinking - that I know best! But I don't. Truly I don't, and neither did that girl in the picture there.