Goodbye, 2019

It feels almost cruel how fast time goes by. With 2020 well under way and the first month of this new decade coming to a close this week, I am holding on for dear life to time.

To be honest, I haven’t had a desire to sit down and write for a large portion of last year, but for sentiments sake, I wanted to write a little tribute to the ‘10s and a goodbye to the exciting, painfully stretching, full of sweet community, absolute doozey of a year that was 2019. Whew, we made it. I made it.

I was 13 when 2010 began in the middle of my 8^th grade year. With a closet full of Abercrombie printed tees, thin strap pink Rainbows and Victoria’s Secret body sprays (because that was all I was allowed to buy in “that store”), I was thriving in every sense of the word for those first few years before my parents split up and eventually divorced. The pinnacle of messy in our family and my life was their marriage ending, but so many quiet, dark storms swarmed wildly in the years to come.

Disclaimer: I absolutely adore my parents and have watched the Lord rebuild brokenness and hurt within a divorce which has been really, really great. But, by no means do I want to skim over all He taught me through it.

Ten years full of journals with angry, confused ink written so deep that it bled through to the next page, and words that blended together into blobs on paper from wet alligator tears– but more often than those, paragraphs and paragraphs of uncanny blessing and trying to wrap my head around all that He gave to me– to all of us.

In the lifetime that has felt like the last ten years, I stand at the end of it with deep wounds turned to faint scars I can now barely see, feeling extremely, extremely grateful.  

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The biggest issue that smeared over a large portion of 2010-2020 was my lack of trust in God, which undoubtedly brought me down a path filled with more examples that this blog could hold of quiet fear, self-righteousness, random anxiety, pride and crippling people-pleasing.

And yeah, self-awareness is a really great thing until it isn’t, leaving you believing that the laundry list of things you need to “work on” are only fixable from muscling it up and doing it yourself instead of marching right over to the seat of the throne and dropping it at the feet of Jesus.

That reflex pulls me in every direction but towards God, but I’m learning that I don’t have to apologize a million times or do a million really great Christian-y things to counter the not-so-Christian-y-things.

I’m just forgiven.

And I think forgiveness and freedom are supposed to feel too easy—because it is. Because it’s got nothing to do with how much or how little we deserve it.

I figure most people with air in their lungs have a hard time with this and that gives me a little comfort. I hope it does for you too. The in-between of what we were ten years ago, the old, tough things that have brought us to here, and the knowledge that we’re supposed to be free right now… it’s a lot! But I know that God has taught me over and over that the healing and using of the past and making things new isn’t my job, it’s His.

I’m His.

All of the hard things have not just helped me see but made me understand that tribulation keeps me paying attention.

And we can stand up taller facing a new decade with more strength than the last, because it’s near impossible not to feel gratefulness bubble over when we realize the only reason we’ve ever made it out alive was because of Him.