goodbye 200fricken5

I'm going to go ahead an say 2005 was not my favorite year. When I look back i see a dreary hopelessness that vacated adventure and excitement from my eyes, so many expelled tears that it's a wonder my body didn't shrivel from dehydration, and a pure trust in God lost to my selfish need for control. It's dull and it's wasted and it usually evokes a word like "yuck" and I hide my head and my body jerks like I got a sudden case of the chills and I want to shake the whole thing off, leave it behind, and pretend it never happened.

But the really funny thing is that ... last year was also one of the most beautiful years of my life. Seriously- I'm not joking.I'm amazed. I really am. I like to call that pockets of grace. I can't believe all the good I got. I surely didn't deserve it. I was a stubborn, selfish girl who kept taking advantage of grace just enough to survive.

However... I am more myself than I have ever been in my life. More sure of what I am unsure about and comfortable not being sure about anything- including God. I have learned to laugh at myself, I have learned to cry or grow angry and then get up and shrug my shoulders, I have lost my grounding on the logical reality I have always had and found myself muddled in a sea of unfamiliar feelings that seemed like reality. I have learned how to trick myself till the feeling fades and reveals true reality. I have learned to stop caring and that I am only as strong as those around me. I have learned to laugh at somber things. I have learned to like tea and I tasted shrimp dip and liked it.

I have starved myself of God and found that He is deeper than I thought, I know less of him than I ever have did and yet... I am closer to him than before. I have placed myself in a self imposed desert and kept myself there for fear of the comfort of lush greens... yet God keeps bringing the feast to me. God has become a raw reality that the few times I focus on it's reflected waters I realize how everything in life pales in comparison.

It changes my tears of hurt to tears of amazement and the fullness of love. It strips my feelings of inadequacy, dullness of personality, and loss of dignity, to a beloved little girl who just likes to go and play. a flicker of mysterious peace so deep that even when i am crabby or mad...it doesn't shift.

Do any of us deserve this grace? I mean, not really... but I guess God thinks we do, or at least he figured out a way to make us deserve it so he could keep giving it to us. Why should so much be given to us when we spend most of our time refusing it? And if we keep getting so much beauty- why don't we pucker up and learn to take it when it's offered instead of waiting till we are starving on the desert floor? Why in our selfishness is God still so good?

AND SO.... I have only one resolution. To not let one day stack on another so that I am weary. When a new day comes I can leave the last day behind me. I think the bravest thing a person can do face their sorrow and failures and walk through it to find the beauty. It takes a lot of tries. "above all we must avoid the hopeless yielding to things as they are" a wise man once said.

I am still learning. And really the only thing I'll ever learn is how much I don't know. I still bemoan and sulk, get crabby and stubborn and I still pretend sometimes. I mean 2005 wasn't the worst year it could have been- sure it squeezed my inards out and sucked the air from me but... hey- who doesn't have moments like that? There are plenty more to come no use to relive the old ones! So raise a glass, look at yourself in the mirror and laugh every once in awhile, eat your favorite food, let the jerk tailing you pass you and enjoy the trees passing by, do something idiotic, make a zoolander face, don't take a long line at the store too seriously,. and for goodness sake...

...look at all the beauty. I would live 100 years of 2005 again if they would all promise to yield such a harvest.