This Is It. And, No, It Isn’t.

I’ve written on and off the majority of my life. I’ve never been strictly disciplined about it, but I’ve always needed words to help me process the world around me. Last week I filled up another journal. My entries vary from daily to weekly to monthly. I scribble sermon notes and mark dates where my kids have seen fit to add their own art between entries. Every square inch of blank space inside the covers is chiseled with quotes that cut most deep.

This particularly perfect shade of purple Moleskine journal was my most epic, in the traditional sense of the word. It loosely chronicles my life from just after being accepted into Redbud Writers Guild in May of 2013 to two weeks ago. Flipping the pages I find that so little and yet so much has changed. I’m still buried under laundry and dishes. Angsty with longing for a fuzzy calling. Seeking the Lord in my own imperfect, learn-as-I-go way.

Some things have changed drastically. I have no more babies, no more diapers, and consistently sleep through the night. I type this incredulously. I don’t know that I ever really expected to survive that stage of life. Or that I would be sane enough to look back on it and say that was hard, but it was good. Necessary, even.

I’m beginning to see the small, faithful choices I made may actually be adding up to something. Again, I am dumbstruck with wonder. I mean, of course they did. But they really have! I kept writing and kept plugging away. And sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I got mad and anxious and tired of waiting for whatever is supposed to be happening to just happen already.

I still have unmet longings, desires I don’t know exactly what to do with, situations that have yet to reveal their significance, decisions requiring more discernment. But, I also have contentment. However, it wasn’t all that long ago, and I can find numerous entries to attest to this, that I didn’t think I could stand the laundry and cooking and cleaning and homework and stewarding one more minute. The moment I cried out from that mountain of freshly washed whites, “This is it?! This is Your best for me?!”

He didn’t answer all at once, but I can see He’s been answering my angry, confused, gut-wrenching cry by degrees over the past two years, as this journal attests. He has been, in my humble opinion, s l o w l y and painstakingly answering my incessant questioning to the full.

Yes, this is it. And, no, this isn’t it.

If I were to pick one overarching lesson of the life captured in this journal, plastered with a fading yet prophetic sticker that claims Hope Changes Everything, I would say that life cannot be lived in the future. I tried that. It makes you angsty and anxious and unable to be present in the now. Or, as Dumbledore so eloquently put it: “It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.” I spent too much time forgetting and not nearly enough dwelling, but, by God’s strength, I’m learning to be more present now.

By His strength I have changed approximately a bajillion diapers and survived torture-level sleep deprivation and continue to major in the mundane of motherhood.

This is it.

And, no, this isn’t it.

Not all of it. In the midst of all that surviving I have a written testament to how I doggedly, often in a zombie-like stupor, kept after the Lord. Anger, praise, anxiety, joy, grief, hope, and my somewhat limited version of all the feels were brought to Him consistently, expectantly. Okay, honestly, a lot of impatiently going on in there, too.

Also during this process, I started using gifts that I was pretty sure I had been given by mistake. In their own teeny tiny way they gained momentum. No one is more surprised by this than me.

I just want to shout across the Jordan to any of you still wandering in that early motherhood madness that you can do this. By God’s strength somehow all the days and hours and minutes when you don’t think you can possibly go on, well they somehow keep adding themselves up. You’re going to have to just trust me on this. I know you don’t really believe me; I wouldn’t have.

All the hard things that rub you raw right now are actually shaping you.

I’m afraid I’ve gotten us completely twisted around when what I really want is to point you toward a straight path through the wilderness. I’m trying to tell you not to live obsessed with a future you can at best influence, but will never control. That’s a miserable way of life that doesn’t practice present-right-now living. I know it seems impossible when the right-now is just hard and what you really want is escape. Oh, I know. At the same time, don’t think you need to abandon your dreams, but give yourself over to the formation process of the here and now because you don’t yet know into what shape you’re being formed. I’m not saying I’ve completely figured out mine, but I can tell you that I look different on the page today than I did two years ago. You will be rubbed raw by your circumstances, but your character will come out smoother, rough edges softened. If you surrender yourself to His process, you will look more like Him than when you started.

Certainly, if I have learned anything solid and worth sharing over the past two years, it’s that Dallas Willard always says it best–but that’s not going to stop me from trying.

“God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are, and if we faithlessly discard situation after situation, moment after moment, as not being “right,” we will simply have no place to receive his kingdom into our life.”

–Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy

Don’t waste your life constantly straining to see what’s ahead. Live a life today that fills journals with tales of small and ordinary faithfulness. The mundane matters, maybe more than we realize. Don’t fight its current, but allow the grace of it to pull you along as all that small faithfulness joins up and overflows to the lives of people you’ve been chosen to serve. However that plays out in your right-now.

Because this is it, friends. And, no, it isn’t.