The Best Years of Your Life

Just a few days ago, we celebrated this little one:

graduating from high school:

The days and weeks following my graduation were life changing. There wasn’t a single ounce of me that felt sad about high school ending. I’ve never related to the saying that the high school years are the best years of your life; I spent so much of that particular season feeling unsure about who I was and insecure in my own skin. When graduation was over, it didn’t feel like an ending. It felt like a beginning.

Of course it was an ending and a beginning. Lydia is like me in many ways at this age—eager to get on with the rest of her life, eager to begin.

It’s been over 20 years since I graduated from high school and I stand by my assertion that the best years of your life are unfurling right before your eyes, even in the midst of the hardest suffering, because all of it is compounding and collecting into the fullness of life, becoming. 

Sometimes we don’t have eyes to see it. At 18, I only had visions of a future I hoped for. At 41, I have both visions of a future I still hope for and the realization of so many moments—childhood enjoyed, marriage sustained, friendships gained, careers picked up and discarded, faith restored and reinforced, and children experiencing their own unfurling, and more, more and more.

I’ve enjoyed every season of our kids’ lives and I’ve also been glad to move on to the next season. It isn’t in my nature to want this particular season to last longer—in my own life and in the lives of our family. There’s more to come, more to come, and I am ready for it.

But of course it’s also an ending. I put together a photo album for Lydia documenting her entire life from birth to 18, and you can bet I wept. You can flick through 18 years and 40 pages in just a few minutes. The blink of an eye. A thousand years like a day.

We filled that time with beauty, joy, growth, faith, grief, and love, and if we’re able to do the same with the days that remain ahead of us, life will be abundant indeed.

Ordinary Time: Meditations from the In-Between

I’ve gotten out of my blogging habit, which means I’ve also failed to announce here that my sixth book, Ordinary Time: Meditations from the In-Between, is now available! This essay collection weaves together the ordinary and the sacred in life’s tapestry of tragedy and grace. The essays in this book grapple with faith through every season—dating, early marriage, miscarriage, my mom’s cancer journey, fear and parenting, violence and parenting, memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease, the waiting after mammograms and before biopsies, and more, including some of the little joys that grace our lives but often go overlooked. It is an essay collection, not a memoir, and so it collects bits and pieces of my life and thoughts around the framework of the church liturgical calendar.

If you want a signed copy, you can get one here, or you can stack up your Amazon Prime points and order online (ebook, paperback, and hardcover are all available now). Someday, I will record an audiobook of this and American Honey. Maybe soon?

The Next Years of My Life

It’s impossible for me to live in this moment without reflecting on the next years of my life and what they may hold. In two years, Elvis will graduate. In five, Henry. Lydia has her own dreams of marriage and career and family, which are entangled with my dreams of being a doting grandmother. Brandon and I look with excitement and some trepidation toward the “empty nester” years. More importantly, we are looking in the same direction. 

There are also the very real fears held off at arm’s length, of very real ends of life for parents we love fiercely, losing health, losing friends, losing loved ones, entering the season of more losses than gains. What will that season look like? How will we be changed and shaped? When will they need us? How sudden or slow will that happen? How can we best love the people who have loved us best as they reach their elder years?

These questions used to be so much more pressing when my mom’s cancer was a looming shadow of mortality instead of the miraculous cure we are able to mostly abide in for this time. We’ve been able to push those fears and questions to the gravelly shoulder of the road most hours of the day, but they’re still there, unhelpful.

I’ve come to realize in the last few years of heightened uncertainty and humbling that there is only one way to push back the fears about the next years of our lives. I must hold it all loosely, open, in the palms of my hands, and have faith.

I simply do not know what or when or how it will all go, but I trust that it will all be held. It will all be brought together, restored, unified, and rejoiced over. It is already held, made by and through and in Christ, for the sake of love, extravagantly given and cherished. 

These are the best years, these and those and the next and the ones that come after it. It is all gift.