Sunday, November 24, 2013

What a Ten Year Old and Disney Princesses Taught Me on my 36th Birthday

So today is the first day of my 37th year. (This always confuses me. I just turned 36. So I am FINISHING my 36th year and STARTING my 37th, yes???) Anyway, birthdays are always great times for reflection and contemplation...

{Complete sidenote, and I needed to get this out of the way or it's going to bug me the entire time I write. I have a really hard time writing after I've had a "writing high". Any time I have written a post I have loved that has had lots of readers, I am almost scared to write again. It makes little to no sense, I know. But in keeping with the spirit of Athena that requires me to word vomit and live as the biggest open book ever on the earth, I needed to say that. So this post, it is making me uncomfortable.}

Anyway.

I love a good birthday on fb, and one post yesterday really got my attention. It said,
"You really seem to enjoy your life." 
It's really very true, and it actually surprised me a bit (which it probably shouldn't have)... I do enjoy my life. I have been so blessed with so many wonderful people and places that mean so much to me. I feel called to my job, I feel like God has placed me in certain ministries that occupy huge pieces of my heart, and I have some really fun hobbies.

But I have this one issue... I'm always waiting. 

I am waiting on one of two things. Number one, I am always waiting on the shoe to drop. (That saying makes no sense and I wonder if I have mixed metaphors...) The guillotine to fall... (That's WAY more gruesome than necessary) I don't know. But I do feel like I always have a sense of just waiting on it all to fall apart. The terrifying diagnosis, the tragic accident, the financial disaster, the wayward child, the horrific scandal... something awful in which this little house of cards I've been dealt is going to crash to the ground. I don't know what it is that makes me feel this way, but it's been part of my life since I was tiny. I just always have a sense of dread of the unknown, inevitable... and it's always bad.

Secondly, I am always waiting on "just the right time". Whereas many people look backward, I look forward to the "next thing". Always the "next thing". When I was in elementary school, I wanted to be a teenager. When I was a teenager in high school, I couldn't wait for college. I spent my college years anticipating marriage and a career. The first thing I looked toward when I got married was the house and kids. With the arrival of Kelsey (whom I knew to be our last biological child) and the move to this house (that we will eventually die in), I started to hope for a future adoption. That's where I still am, in fact. And with all of those future hopes and dreams is a sense of holding back because I can't "waste it all" until it's "the right time".

Yesterday, Emma was cleaning some things out of her room. She brought a sheet of Disney princess stickers, all packaged up and never opened. She handed it to me and said, "Send these to Shelby [a friend's young daughter]. I'm too old for them now." I asked her why she hadn't ever opened them and this was her answer:
"I was waiting till I had something that was worthy of them to put them on. They were too nice to just stick on something and I didn't want to waste them."

I'm not kidding, I'm crying right now as I type this. Although she didn't seem to be terribly bothered by it, the whole experience made me sick inside. Those stickers were so special that she saved them until it was too late to use them at all.

They were magical... glittery princesses that had the power to transform something simple into something glorious. Except by holding back, they have become ordinary girls wearing pretty dresses on sticky-backed paper.

It just made me wonder... what am I holding back? What is so special to me that nothing seems worthy of it? And am I going to "save it", waiting on "the right time", until the window closes and the magical becomes the ordinary? The princesses become girls? The glitter becomes dust?

So I decided yesterday, on the 36th anniversary of my birth, to stop holding back. I'm going to tear off the plastic, rip into the stickers, and slap them onto my life. I'm going to revel in the right now instead of waiting for the next thing... whether that next thing is my life's biggest trial or the fulfillment of my heart's most secret dream. Because right now is all I have been promised. And I might even need to use it a bit recklessly, Disney princess stickers and all.

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