Do you ever wonder sometimes how you got to where you are? Like when you think back to a couple years ago, or a lot of years ago did you see yourself where you are now? Did you think it would be the way it is now? Or were you pretty sure it would be different? I look at myself now and I see at what I look like, how I feel, and where I live, and what I am doing with my life; and if I really let myself be honest I am not that surprised.
When I was a 'bit' (haha it feels like a bit but in all reality its quite a while ago now) younger (so in highschool) and I was dreaming about my grand life spread before me (and this was in the moments where I was not taxiing my siblings around in the family mini van or doing the masses of homework I thought was vital to my survival) I thought I would be a missionary to some desperate country, or the Mother Teresa of some orphanage somewhere. I envisioned myself in India or Africa and although I was not wearing a Nun Habit in these dreams exactly (because I didn't think I would look very good in one); I think I sort of thought I would be that to some degree (so if there was a Holy scale and being a nun was at the top I would be pretty close). So bascially I had no reality? No not really. I wanted to be someone who gave of myself on a really huge scale. I think I thought it would make me happy to feel like I was giving to all these 'needy souls.' I think I thought it would fill this gaping hole I had inside me. So I dreamed.
I had a boyfriend from grade ten to twelve and so I also thought he would factor into those dreams somehow. That was not meant to be and that is all I will say about that. After highschool I remember just trying to recover from exams. It seriously took me a month. I studied so hard and did them, did well, but then they were done. Was I going to a be a doctor or a nurse or a teacher? NOPE but I had spent so many hours, months, years just trying to get really good grades.
I then realized, after I recovered, that I needed to get a job. Well, my mother was gently reminding me of this fact. I had had jobs through highschool but this needed to be my first 'adult' job. I ended up working at a camp for the summer. If you have ever worked at a camp then I dont need to explain that. I was not a counselor I worked in the kitchen. This translates into a A LOT of hours standing, cutting, hot stoves, sharp knives, hours of conversations and trying five hundred ways to cut a lot of onions without being in agony. My boyfriend and I had broken up and I was heart broken and so this camp was my first taste of adulthood. I was there on my own making my own decisions. I was out in the middle of no where. I was sad and angry and I started to see reality. I was 'serving' people all day and I didn't feel too saintly about it. I was tired and needed to comfort eat a lot, and my legs hurt from standing, and people were crazy. I didn't get to see my highschool friends every day and chat to them every lunch time. I missed them.
After camp I moved to another town and did an Internship program through a church. I traveled through that program. I saw third world conditions and how people lived in garbage dumps and had nothing. I served and served and served. I was hot and sweaty and people that had plumbing didn't have toilet seats or toilet paper. People who had houses had large fences with glass shards stuck in all around the top. When it rained people were out showering in it. I got a tiny taste of what my life might be like if I wanted to do the Mother Teresa life and when we hung out with many many children who lived in squatter villages I had a taste of the desperation that children who must survive every day live in...just how it feels to be around them.
After finishing up that program I nannied a little boy for a couple months and then went to another part of my country and ran a kids summer camp for a church that was just starting. After that I went home to my family for a bit and then I moved back to the town where I had done my internship. I ended up getting married when I was twenty one.
My boyfriend and I ~ we had known each other since grade one but never even considered dating until we were twenty and twenty one. He and I were opposites but we had some dreams that seemed so similar and so amazing. I had sort of given up on the Mother Teresa orphanage dream (sort of but not totally) but I wanted to do missions. I also wanted to live in a small town on some land and to farm, to be simple and organic and to not have a TV :) and help out at a small town church (they are usually in need of people pretty bad), I wanted to do many grand and heroic things (in my mind) and so did he. So logically that meant we were perfect for each other and we should spend the rest of our lives together! So to make that simple, we were going to be travelers and we were going to be heroes of the faith who gave and served.
Well fast forward to our first wedding anniversary and there we were having a miscarriage and that was when I started to realize that dreams are dreams. They are important to have, grand and hopeful as they are. However they are dreams. I am the farthest thing from in a third world country now. I do not run or work at an orphanage. We have not moved out of the town we got married in and it is not that small. I barely even go to church much less am involved and influential :) I live in a house in town and I do not have a garden.
Why am I not surprised? When I went through the miscarriage and then the subsequent cancer and then adopting our daughter and having a new baby....little by little I really saw who I was. I realized the tools I had and didn't have. I realized how ill equipped I was to live life well. I realized how not being a 'hero,' how not being 'Holy,' and how just doing this day to day washing dishes, tucking into bed five hundred times a night, the cooking day after day, the laundry and the many times drudgery that this job is ~ that no one sees other then little ones that expect if of you...that THIS was what I needed to do in order to have any sort of substance to my spirit.
I am really glad of the years I got to dream. I am glad for the time in my life where I felt a sort of invincibility and grandness. I am glad for those drives my boyfriend and I took where we talked endlessly about how amazing it was all going to be. Stars in our eyes.
The reality of this life now is that it is not glamorous. It is blood sweat and tears. It is ships passing in the night with the fog horn on so that we don't hit. It is the getting through, the moments where you laugh so hard you cry but you realize that you have not laughed that hard for a very long time, it is the no sleep, the no sleep, and the once again no sleep. It is blinding glory filled moments where you can feel the holiness of the laying yourself down once again and how it has brought you one step closer to something and someone you really want to be. It is sharing in suffering. It is the beauty of the moments you just can't take forgranted anymore and the little tiny things that you now so appreciate. If it is the sheer determination to stick with it, to keep on.
At a craft fair this year (yes at a craft fair), my friend asked me what my dreams were, what I wanted to do when I had some time to myself; and I had nothing. No grand thoughts rushed in, no wishes, no stars. I was blank. I felt a little silly. I remember when my husband had asked me that maybe five years before and I had a good many still. I tried to analyze it, thinking maybe I needed to feel sorry for myself that all my dreams were dead. Then I also realized nope, no dead dreams. They just changed, shifted and I realized what I am living now is the grandest dream for me. It is the hardest. Dang it is hard and I really dont like it sometimes and I feel really bad at it. Yet at the same time it is indescribable this life.
Stars in my eyes. They are my children these stars. Wishes in my heart ~ my husband ~ that we make it through all this stronger than we ever started, more authentic, more mature, more attached, more vulnerable, less proud and more real.
What a journey.
Thank you to the One who knows my heart, knows my heart the best, and who has given me all these great gifts. Thank you xo
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