Happy Birthday!

22 years are only the beginning of a long life and yet I feel like a very old 22. Along with my old joints and grouchy tendencies, my senior citizen club card is being renewed with each year! However, this year I think is the first year in a long time, that I felt my birthday could be a celebration. I spent years hating the day I was born because it only signified pain and anger. God has brought me a long way and was able to share something truly special with me this year. My birthday, falling on a Wednesday night this year, I spent with my college group at our normal bible study each week. Singing praises, I’m learning to initiate a state of thankfulness as my worship, something that doesn’t ever come easy to me. As I stood, God just laid His hands on me and brought me a vision from my past. I love how He does that because there is so much wrapped into one thought, God is so complex and amazing. My mind went back to years of hating myself, depression, and pain. Journals filled with blood and tears and endless thoughts cried out for my deliverance or understanding or anything to show that my God cared. In this moment, I thought about the promise I had made myself in my early teenage years that by age eighteen, I will be free from everything, one way or the other. Whether God saved me or I gave up, only time could tell, but I vowed that I wouldn’t live another year of what I had known to be my life. My eighteenth birthday came and went, and for the life of me I never knew how God had carried me through it all, and I still couldn’t tell you how, but that’s what makes it so glorious. So four years later, I’m surrounded by His people who love me, singing about the little I know of God’s glory, and God whispers, “Aren’t you glad you didn’t keep your promise?” With the pictures of sleepless nights and dyed blood flooding my memory, tears roll down my face, he continues, “Aren’t you glad that I kept Mine?” Breathless, I sit back in awe, unable to respond with anything short of being completely motionless. Void of all my normal brain patterns whirling about, I just sit still, “wow”. With everything that God has carried me through, I can say that I’m grateful for His Grace and His Love. I can’t say that I even know what it really looks like, but I have seen glimpses that leave me hungry and searching for more. Even if I don’t ever see anything more from God, His work in my life do far would be enough. I don’t know how these things finally come together but that’s what makes it so glorious. To all of my friends, thank you for being the love of God in my life and sharing with me what can finally be a celebration in my mind. Twenty-two years old, and hopefully growing younger and younger in God’s sight, always a child, always in need of a daddy.