Leaving Egypt.

 

I am a birthday person. As someone in my counseling group said tonight, “Loving your birthday is like self care – people really should celebrate the entire month!” Needless to say, I whole heartily agree with her opinion.

Now, I dont know that this is a widely known fact, but people have “Golden Birthdays.” Your Golden Birthday is when the age that you are turning matches the date that you were born (17 on April 17th for example). Your Golden Birthday is supposed to be a very special birthday, or at least an excuse to have an extra -umph in your birthday hoopla.

Even less commonly known are “Silver Birthdays.” This is simply you 25th birthday; the date that you are ushered into your quarter of a century. These birthdays also cause for greater celebration – celebrating the fact that you’ve survived childhood, made it mostly into adulthood, and that you are well on your way.

For a very few special people in the world, you get one day in your life that surpasses all the rest of your birthdays. If you were born on the 25th of any given month, you have your golden and silver birthday on the same day. Dear friends, I was born on October 25th. And I can tell you, I have have been excited to be 25 since I was old enough to figure out the colossal coincidence of my birthday.

So, as we are rounding the corner onto my big day (ok, so we really have 5 months, but we are over half way there!), I have begun to think about the reality of being 25. 

Twenty Five.

Looking over the course of my life, I wouldn’t tell you that I had an agenda. I wouldn’t have told you that I have a schedule. As organized (and arguably neurotic) as I am about planning, I have never sat down and planned out the events of my life. “Get married by 23, have a house by 24, pop out first kid by 26.” In fact, for the most part, I’d say that I have been pretty content to figure out my life events as they come at me.

But as I have begun to roll downhill to my 25th birthday, I have begun to look around at the scenery of my life at this point. And as I look at where I am in my life, my job, my growth and emotional development, I am completely caught off guard.As a six year old, dreaming about having a party on the 25th of October, with 25 candles in my cake and 25 people singing me happy birthday, I always imagined something a little different than this. I’d love to believe I didnt have an agenda, but as I am am coming closer and closer, I am realizing I DID.

I don’t think that I had specifics, but I know that I thought that I would be a little bit more settled than this. Maybe that I would be a little further and successful in my career. That I would be relatively emotionally stable, and dating someone seriously. I would MOST DEFINITELY have my own place by now. I didn’t have every detail etched in stone, but I know that I didnt think that it would look like this.

This week at church, we brushed upon an interesting point. In Exodus 16, we find the Israelites in the midst of a mess (What else is new?). They are lost in the desert. They are hungry. And they are pissed. We find them talking smack on Moses and Aaron – making accusations that they are frauds leading them into the desert to die. And the really interesting part is, they begin to dream about Egypt.

The whole Israelite community set out from Elim and came to the Desert of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenthday of the second month after they had come out of Egypt. 2 In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. 3The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the LORD’shand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.”

Flip back a few chapters, and we all seems to remember the Israelites being in complete bondage – slaves, working 15 hour days without adequate supplies, while their families are starving, dying, and agonizing.  But that’s not what the memory looks like to the Israelites in that moment. In their minds, Egypt was the best days of their life – they remember meat,  parties, and relaxation.

  

Slavery?? …Naa… Egypt was more like this:

 

 

  Now I would laugh at them for so clearly being ….um…RETARDED… except for the part where I do the same thing. I look at my life, and dont see all the tick marks where I thought they’d be at this point in the game, and I realized that I’m a little irked by that. Even for my future, I have things that I want to happen a certain way. Read my blog from earlier last week and you know that it’s a dream of mine to get out of Orange Country; to live internationally and work overseas.

And as I’m sitting in church, it slowly begins to sink in…my schedule for my life is my Egypt. The check list that I thought I would have finished by my Golden Birthday is my Egypt. My dreams for my future are my Egypt. I have been freed from so much in the course of my life. The more that I have trusted God and walked with Him, the more crazy adventures, interesting stories, and wild desires have come. But still, I have the urge to turn around and long for the days where I called the shots, where I got to say what life was going to look like. “At 25 life will be…[fill in the blank].”

So it turns out that I don’t have much on the Isrealites. Leaving Egypt is harder than you think. I dont know that I am able to say “God I don’t care if we never go anywhere interesting. I dont care if we stay in Orange County. I dont care if we wander the desert for 40 years. I just want to be with you, no matter where you are. You are always withy me in a pillar of fire or a cloud, you give me manna and quails, and I’m cool with that.”

So, when is your next birthday? And what’s on the checklist before that day? Where is your Egypt?  Are you ok with your dreams looking more like desert than promise land? And, if you do find that you have managed to find you way out of Egypt and into contentment, … Can you please pass the map?

 

 

 

  

Life is a Monet

Life is a Monet
Current mood: adventurous

This weekend was especially encouraging for me. And I suppose I should write it all down before I dont see it anymore. 

I have been struggling with the same battle for months. Here is the thing that keeps me flying in emotional circles: it seems that “it is always something.” And I keep coming back to the statement “Happiness is a Choice”. The idea that life is never going to come together in my perfect Hallmark Card. Instead that I have to learn to be thankful for all things in all seasons. Unfortunately this means even in the seasons in which you are waiting for change. Even if that season is much to much, and more than twice as long as you wished for.

Over the weekend I talked to my dear friend, and I suddenly had this grand, very simple realization. Life is a Monet. We’ve all heard guys and girls called Monet’s….people who “From far away look super hot, but up close, their faces are kinda a mess.”

My realization was that life is that way. When hearing adventurous stories of your friends getting lost in train stations half way around the world, not knowing how they were going to get home and being incredibly late for important meetings, life seems like some wild and romantic novel. Sitting on the other end of the phone line, I could help but jealously sob at why I wasnt getting lost at some train station, and instead I feel helplessly stuck in a life that isnt moving.

But the truth is, when you are sitting on the wrong train in a country that you have never been to, and realize that you dont know where you are, and that you ARE going to miss the meeting, where the romantic adventure feelings? You never have any! Anxious, nerves, spinning thoughts. These are the moments where you look at your life and realize “Its a MESS. I’m falling apart. Why can’t it ever be just easy? Why don’t things just come together for me EVER?”

But here is the thing: six months later when you are sharing the story over a dinner table of your closest friends, glasses of wine and appetizers, you dont remember that horrible mess part. You are far away, and dont see all of the tiny dots of paint that never made sense. You see the art and the beauty of the whole struggle. You see the masterpiece that has been created through such abstract movement and fortunes.

So as my friend Liz said “Jenni, life always looks exciting from half a world away. Believe me, you may feel like you are always struggling to choose happiness, but from down here you look like you are the main character of the greatest adventure novel ever written.”

And you know…she is right. And I need to remember that more.

But that is the battle. Getting it one weekend. Seeing the forest for the trees, and understanding why things are the way that they are. And it is just a glimpse. Because in a few days I most definitely will forget the view I just saw. And I will go back to seeing only the trees, and missing the forest. Seeing all of the chaotic strokes of paint and mis-matched colores. Never seeing the portrait that is really being painted.

I will come full circle again and again. I will forget and be reminded. I will choose to be happy today. I will hate my job, and my romantic life, and my car, and my computer, and my social plans. I will hate that I do have to choose to be happy. And some how, struggleing through the mess, and choosing to at least TRY to see the beauty is what makes these seasons not mere chaotic strokes of paint, but real art masterpieces.

Walking Around Alive.

       In this life it always seems that there is a little more stretching and a little more thinness that we’d planned on. There is always just a little less time and a little less money than we need to really be happy. And I can’t help but feel that at the end of it all, I have to wake myself from walking around like a human shell. Constantly saying “Don’t miss it.”

      It’s just that there can be so much life that gets lost between the breaths and the blinks, and it always seems that there can be something saved for tomorrow or simply done another day. Some days I want to shake it all and scream “Be alive. Don’t miss it. Don’t blink and don’t breathe. Because if you blink you might get caught up in it all and miss the whole point.”

    The worries of today weigh our slumped shoulder far closer to the earth in half delirious living that consists of bland tastes and weak lighting. It is fight, a constant struggle, to to drink our breaths deeply, to feel our feelings intensely, to ensure our time invested in the people that we love. It is far to easy to simply “call her tomorrow” or think “they didn’t send me a card for my birthday either.”

     But what if that is all that matters? What if the whole point is that we walk in this life awake enough to see? Alive enough to taste and breathe, awake enough to see the people and things that cry to us for intimacy and touch? Are we so easily silenced by our work deadlines and our calendars that hold us captive to ball and chain? Is life so easily satisfied that we can merely lay half dead on our couches after 15 hour days of craziness, simply wishing that the world had a slower setting, and the time would pass a little less quickly? Is there a way to fight the cataracts that continually disease our eyes to be blind to all of the beauty and excitement that awaits us if only we could see it?

   It is in the struggle of these these questions that we must sit. That we must drink in the life between the breaths. Inhale and hold deeply. To feel intematly. It is in this that I cry out “Lord dont let me miss the whole thing. All that is beautiful is in you Lord. Let me see it. Take the disease from these old eyes to see the places where you are crashing into my world. Give me ears to hear the symphony that is You all around me. Let me feel your grace that washes over me, declaring your truth in who I am. Rest on me in this place. Let the softness of your life wake me into something more than death. Let me not refuse your call, let me walk willingly in the adventure of it all. Let me sit at your feet and declare that you are the only one for me. That no one other than you can create a life that is worth living with. That at the end of it all it is you that never leaves me. That is you that walks me through the battles and equipts my sward. That is only you that provides and cares for my every need. That you have never left my side, that you have never left me alone, that you have always kept intently your promise that declairs ‘I will never leave you.’ Thank you for letting me play. Thank you for taking the death from my eyes and bringing my shell of a life into a vibrant creation that is worth being lived. Let me not miss it. Let me not feel the chains of death long after they have been removed. Let me not live like a small scared girl. Let me live free. Let me live brightly. Let me live dangerously and excitingly. Show me the places where the illusion of chains still exists, and show me how to move beyong into free new territory. Show me to slow. Show me to breathe. Show me to blink. Show me not to miss it in the breathing and blinking. And most of all, show me how to walk around being alive.”