living out God's thoughts
I am here!
Last Monday I left Canada and headed to the States to begin a new season of life. =) I'm studying at CCEF for at least a year, and Heidi drove down with me to help me settle in. It was nice to have almost a week of sister-time before she gets married... The week felt like a bit of a whirlwind though. We arrived just in time for supper at our friends' house, spent the next day shopping, Wednesday went to the ocean and then another family had us over for dinner on our way back, Thursday spent the morning with wedding preparations and then the afternoon visiting, and I had my first class that evening. (!!!) Friday we stopped by Heidi's former landlady's place for lunch, hit the thrift store and spent some time exploring on foot before driving downtown for Heidi to take the bus back home that night. Oh, and there were things to do for the wedding inbetween most of the cracks =) Saturday I mourned the absence of my sister a little, and also discovered a cafe/train station with a weekly farmer's market in the parking lot at the end of my street, did errands and watched an old Audrey Hepburn movie.
Today was my birthday. I'm twenty-three today. I was pondering the matter of ages and I think there is a trend at the end of the summer that everyone asks about your age and the ages of your siblings (because of school starting? More changes? I do not know) and it just so happens the majority of our family's birthdays are in the fall. This means I say "I have one nineteen-year-old brother, one turning seventeen, and one turning thirteen." I was starting to say "I'm turning twenty-three" too. All that rambling to say it doesn't feel weird to me when we all do turn twenty-three, seventeen and thirteen because I've been talking about it for a while.
I wasn't expecting today to be much out of the ordinary because my family is all up at the cottage where our cell phones don't do too well and I didn't think my friends here knew it was my birthday but I was pleasantly surprised by a phone call from most of my family before church, and then at church Anna J seemed to have notified the whole congregation that it was my birthday! =) I even ended up with two cakes, one from her daughter and one at the parsonage where I was invited for lunch. It was a lovely day.
I'm looking forward to my two classes tomorrow... I would like to meet some new people from class. Thursday's class there were students from Florida, India, England, Canada (one besides myself!) China and a few other places I'm forgetting - all that in a class of approximately 17 people! There is a young Irish couple attending my friends' church who are also from Westminster, too. I love their accent =) It's fun to start making connections. I'm so excited to just LEARN. I've been a teacher for three years, now the tables are turned. I love it. I love the stuff I'm learning and I love having interesting people around to study and learn from too. I pray that the things I take in, in this year/year-and-a-half, will be things I can turn around and share for the rest of my life. And I pray that I will have the courage to take the opportunities that are there - or hunt them down, if they don't seem to be there. It is easier to be alone. It's tiring to be friendly to people you don't know that well. But I've been learning that life in Christ is life in community. (For example...) And I've been so blessed, especially this past year or so, by random and not-so-random relationships in my home church. Which I definitely miss. But I know what has been can never be erased. Sometimes I've wished it could be. But I think I'm learning, little by little, how much better God's plans are than mine. He decided, before the beginning of time, that we would have seasons in our lives, people in our lives, each for a time to teach us and bless us. If one never ended, we couldn't fit them all in. I remember John Piper talking about how we weren't made for separation. How closing a chapter of life hurts because we were made for beginnings. And he reminded me that the good things that end, only end temporarily. A new heavens and new earth mean an eternity of beginnings. Can you imagine, we will be remade to be able to withstand that much glory? All this to say... I think it means I need to invest in eternity. In my everyday moments. To feed on the Word and talk to my Lord instead of to myself, to love others, even imperfectly, to seek wisdom and trust the future to the One who fashioned my days "when as yet there were none of them." I've lived 8395 of those days, and He has been perfectly faithful in every one of them. He hasn't told me how many more I have, but I know He will continue the work He has begun.
Thank You, Lord!
Comments