Walk With Me

Yesterday evening I took a long walk on the beach. Strolling down the shore line I thought about everything that has happened in my life over the past ten years. I thought about all the great times I've had and all the rough things I've gone through. When I step back and look at who I am today, where I am and how my life has unfolded, I am overwhelmingly grateful. I'm amazed at the places God has rescued me from; how he has pulled me out of places where I had gotten myself stuck. I remembered stepping on the very same beach when I moved here ten years ago and how I never thought back then that I'd still be here. I certainly never thought I would have gone through all that I have in those ten years.

I imagined myself stepping back onto the beach in ten years from now, thinking back over my life. This time I'd be watching my kids run out ahead of me as we walked the beach together. For a moment, I smiled. Then I became overwhelmed with the realization that the next ten years of my life are in no way going to be easier than the last ten, and that in fact they would most likely be harder. How will I manage the next phase of my life; all the decisions, the choices?

What am I going to do after school? What will it be like to finally be doing something I really love? What's it going to be like when I get married? Will he want to live here? Will I move? How do I decide when to have kids? And how many? How do we decide how we are going to raise our kids? How am I going to teach my kids all the things I want them to know without pushing them too hard? How do I know when I'm being too laid back or when I'm coming on too strong? What if I don't protect them enough? What I shelter them too much? How do I raise my kids in a way that passes on only the good from my parents and breaks the cycle of the bad? How do I decide who to let watch my kids? Will I have to work? Will I like staying home? What happens when my kids go to school and I freak out about not being able to be there?

I could write a novel based on all the questions I have. It strikes fear in the core of my very being, it really does. That kind of fear, the questions of the unknown, is usually what drives my instincts to kick in; my instincts to run away. I'm a natural quitter at heart, I really am; it's sad. I hate that about myself. I don't deal well when things get hard, when I don't have answers, when there's no one there to take care of me, to decide for me, to tell me what to do.

If anything though, the past ten years have shown me that those instinct, the ones that make me want to turn and run, are completely wrong. I have found that when I stay, when I persevere, when against all odds I maintain a hope that things will get better, they actually do. Things change, they evolve, they improve. Not only that, but even greater things happen; things I never could have wished for or scripted into life had I wrote it myself. I have found happiness in the very place I didn't want to go and I remind myself of that every single day.