I remember always wanting to be in my 20s but as a teen/college student I never dreamed of my 30s. Not for any dark reasons or hopeless reasons... unless something crazy happens to me before midnight I will be 30... but it was not even until the last month or two that I really even realized I was turning 30... like I knew I was 29 and I know how to count but it was not some huge life goal for me.
I use to always live life waiting for the next... next event, next life change, next fun thing, next purchase, next...
I would get sad as an event was ending because I was living for events.
It can be one of the reasons I can be great at filling a calendar because I like there to be a next.
And while my brain is still wired that way it has changed over the years where the next does not run my mind... there does not always have to be some big next, I am content with living life and knowing that living life is enough... life is a journey
Sure that includes making intentional steps... we want to sell our house... so I spent time the last two days purging things... but living with intentionality is different then living for the next exciting thing. It means you line up your life in ways that are helpful and take steps you need to take but it also means that you are ok with where life leads you. I don't need to have the next 20 years of life figured out right now, what I need to do right now is make good holistic life steps, steps that lead to healthy things and sometimes those things will be in specific directions and sometimes those things are to make me a more loving person and trusting that will serve me well in whatever step comes next.
I listened to That Sounds Fun podcast today... the episode with Ben Rector and he was talking about how his advice for him in his 20s was different then his advice for himself in his 30s and I see how true that is... there are things people older then me would say about life when I was in my 20s that didn't feel true to me but as I have gotten older make more sense, I get where they are coming from at a different angle... 20yr old me needed to be thinking about different things then 30yr old me and thats ok.
But here is the thing that I can tell you here on the night before my 30th birthday... I am happy. There is no looking back at past parts of my life and wishing I was back there... sure there are people and place that I wish I was closer to... but I am really happy with my life season.
Content normally gets a really bad wrap... but for me it is the best word to describe this season.
I am a mom which was a dream of mine since I was a toddler. I am a wife to an amazing husband. I have friends who support, challenge me and help me grow. I have family that is very there for me and on my side (wink to my little bro this week... he knows why lol, he had my back from miles away)... my mom has spent the last two days helping me with purging.
Sure are there hard parts of life... yes but there are always going to be hard parts of life! That is life... you can either always live waiting for a different tomorrow or you can live today! I choose today even when that really confuses people.
30 for me is not some big scary mid life thing... its just the next steps and in the midst of lots of steps. It just is.
So here it to the next chapter... I learned SO much in my 20s... I am truly thankful for them... they brought me two wonderful kids and some amazing people... there are many things about me that changed in my 20's and some things that stayed the same and I grew in. They were a gift.
When I thought about writing this post I worried what others would think about me writing a blog about myself (I know, how 9 of me lol) but its my birthday and I'll blog if I want to... it is my blog after all! Maybe in my 30s I'll continue to grow in a healthy balance of what others think of me... although growing in that sounds scary
The next few days are going to bring a lot of fun! Tomorrow I am taking the kids to a children's museum, Friday my parents are taking me to my favorite restaurant, Saturday I get to see some people that mean the world to me that I didn't get to see much in my 20s, and Sunday my friend Sara and I are taking her daughter and Jilli to something that sounds fun and crazy and then a retirement celebration for someone who has meant a lot to me my entire life, oh and Monday we are helping with a fundraiser for the hospital! It is going to be a crazy few days but I am so looking forward to it! The difference between 20yr old me and 30yr old me is that 20yr old me wanted the reason that people gather to be about me... 30yr old me is just thankful to get to spend time with people who I love no matter what that looks like and why people are gathering... it does have to have anything to do with me.
Here are a few articles that I posted on Facebook lately that I found interesting and I know that often Facebook doesn't show everyone everything so I wanted to post them here too...
https://themighty.com/2016/08/undiagnosed-chronic-illness-why-i-want-to-find-something-wrong/?fbclid=IwAR1K2xTgMWe4LvEiKhwzLBnCy29nl8fRm5PLStQIO32jJw7bnV-v96WdvVQ
https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/07/willow-creek-church-evangelical-teens-grow-up.html?fbclid=IwAR0RWL_GZ6OC5InjwKsbUOmUM1SkiW8AcKSxd9uwr9Uu-MJnNeSvLtqsXXw
https://themighty.com/2019/06/parenting-medically-complex-child-when-do-you-fight/?fbclid=IwAR1D775n-ax6hyeSIwxRZxPthmhJpHeeMUhB_WV9iv-swY2yyVlNcPKyLrs
My favorite thing to eat these days is going to the store and finding whatever vegetables are on sale and cut them up and throw them in a pan with some cubed chicken and cook them and then mix in some poppyseed salad dressing and serve it over rice... Brent doesn't like poppy seed so I make his with wing sauce. Super easy... super yummy and reheats nicely... healthy and easy!
Best thing I have heard all day... Lydia asked Jilli to play... Jilli always wants to play with Lydia however Lydia isn't always the kindest in playing and Jilli can get sad easily when Lydia is involved so listening to them playing Peppa nicely together while I type is amazing!!!
Also, thank you to my mom for giving birth to me 30yr ago... she and I both didn't handle child birth well (I decided I needed to flip around and get the cord wrapped around my neck and it got very scary very fast) but I am so thankful for all she and my dad have done for me over the years!
And because I am always thinking about some odd angle of something tonight my head is pondering...
How did American exceptionalism turn to mean that you can not say anything bad about the country while still having a view that we can not do many things. America isn't hopeful... its people really don't believe in a brighter future anymore... we believe in preserve as much as possible because everything is falling apart but that is a very different mindset and enternal motivation then we have had in a country as a past. How did we end up in a place where you are not allowed to say anything bad about the country as a whole (if you do right now you are told to pack your bags and leave?!) but when people advocate for working together to find solutions to improve things we are met with the argument that we as a country can only help some people... that our hands are tied in loving people... we are the richest country in the world! Things just don't add up here. Part of it is that we are ok with con men and corporate corruption because it offers a false sense of security so we are willing to buy the lie to keep the money in some hands that only some people can bed fed and have roofs over their heads... we have collectively bought the lie... but where did hope die? When did we become about only helping ourselves and our people? I know history here so I know this isn't new its just at a peak in my lifetime. It also feels hard because my generation was raised to ask questions, help each other, include everyone, take care of the world... which are all the things the grown ups in our lives taught us but now we are 30 and feel like all of these people are angry at us for turning out exactly how they raised us... like the generations before us believed at one point that the world could be better but now lost their hope but are mad at us for fighting for it. Sometimes being a Millenial is very confusing!
My honest thoughts on that... the American church is hopeless... I saw a post today by someone saying that we have now entered the great Christian persecution and I just sat here confused... do we not remember that there have been times in the last 2,000 years that Christians have literally been used as human candles to light up parties in Rome? The American church has no hope. It sees everything as an attack and that God isn't big enough. It sees every person that doesn't fit into their mold as a threat instead of a person to love. It doesn't think that God's word can be spread in any way that doesn't look the white way. The American church acts like the sky is always falling. Why did we give away our hope. Want things to change... we need our hope back... but its not going to come back by spending all of our time whining that life isn't fair from our air conditioned gated communities. Ps: hope also isn't created by calling others names all the time.
God is big... He has endless love... we don't need to dig in our heals and protect baby Jesus... He isn't in the manger... He already defeated the devil... lets stop getting hung up on culture wars that push people away and instead just do what Jesus call... love people and bring His light and hope to the world. You can fight for prayer in school all day but if you don't have love you have nothing and the fight will fall ill... right now we don't even tolerate our neighbor... can you imagine what Jesus's radical love would do if we followed that instead?
My dream birthday wish... a magic wand that organizes and purges things from the house... I am currently looking at the living room that is a mess... that I cleaned yesterday but I spent most of yesterday working upstairs so the kids played in the living room and it looks like it... one are clean and another a mess!
A fun thing that I would love to do in the next few years is go ride roller costers... this is something people might not know about me... I love Disney (that is known) but its not the movies, its the theme parks specifically theme park history... I collect Disney retired attraction pins... but while Disney by far is my favorite theme park and what most of my youtube subscribed channels are about... but I also love to learn the history and details of roller coasters... weird I know. I go to sleep many nights learning about roller coaster history... but for as relatively close as we live to a Six Flags I have not been there in 10 years! We had talked about taking a trip 7 years ago with friends to hit the biggest roller coaster parks in the country but we very happily found out we were expecting Jilli instead so we called off that trip. When we went to Knotts as a part of Jilli's wish trip I got to ride one big roller coaster but that is all I could ration as time away from the kids and since we were there on a week day in March only half the coasters were open and the two highest rated ones were closed so the lines for the others were really long. Six Flags tickets are really expensive though and just not something that I could prioritize money for. It is also not somewhere that it makes sense to bring my kids who don;t handle heat, over sweat, and their disability services are very lacking especially for oxygen... someone offered to take us next month but required that we take the kids too and there is no way I would ask my kids to go deal with that kind of torcher and there are too many other things that I have to advocate for right now that trying that seems like an unfun day for everyone... so despite my want to ride some cool coasters... I love my kids more... its not a sad thing or a pity thing... it is a "it is what it is" thing... but my goal in my 30s is to get on a larger coaster (I like Disney coasters but they are different).
So onward to 30. I am hopeful and happy. Situations and circumstances frustrate me at times but life is good!
Facebook has been asking me for days to set up a birthday charity fundraiser and while that is a great idea... I can't just choose one place! There are too many non for profits that mean a lot to me so if you are one of those people who likes to donate to one of the birthday fundraisers here are just a couple of places I love:
- Ronald McDonald House
- Tubie Friends
- Gracie's Gowns
- Tiny Superhero
- Make A Wish
- Never Say Never Playground
- Preemptive Love
- Little Lobbyists
- Sing Me A Story
- Bows For Brynlee
- Kade's Klassic
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