Like Clay Half-Molded: The Birthday Blog Post

Birthday Blog Post
Year: 2017

“I think this is when most people give up on their stories. They come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and change the way people buy office supplies. But they get into the middle and discover it was harder than they thought. They can't see the distant shore anymore, and they wonder if their paddling is moving them forward. None of the trees behind them are getting smaller and none of the trees ahead are getting bigger.” 
-Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

Another year come and gone. When someone asks me lately, "How have you been?" I have a hard time answering. I am guessing, from my limited human perspective, that I am in a season of being refined.

Why do I say that?

I see a lot of growth, which is exciting. But I have a feeling that more of the exciting feeling will come later. Right now, in the midst of hope and joy and encouragement and great blessings, it also often feels like I am uncomfortable, in pain, isolated, seeking, confused, scared, angry, irritated, oppressed, battled against spiritually, and sometimes like chunks of me are breaking off.

I am the clay and he is the potter.

I am not young anymore, but not old. I am starting to realize my mortality in a whole new way that is very jarring at times, but then I am young enough that people over 50 just laugh when I tell them things like that.

I have a 3-year-old, and he is both the most adorable and precious little human being, and also the source of much of my day-to-day pain and soul-stretching. The amount of patience that is required to love this little boy in action as well as I love him in my soul is requiring a REMAKING of me that I hope will leave me looking as much like my Savior on the outside as I feel pulled apart and in process on the inside.

I recently watched the movie While We're Young. I could have done without the stuff that earns it an R rating but loved the nuanced ways it looks at generational differences. A conversational snippet from the film that resonated with me was when Ben Stiller's character, Josh, tells his wife, "For the first time in my life I've stopped thinking of myself as a child imitating an adult," and his wife, played by Naomi Watts, responds, "You feel that way, too?"

I feel that way, too. Like I am just on the cusp of being a "real" adult.

I am still getting my bearings in a city that is at once my hometown and an entirely new home. I am not a kid in Austin anymore, and people who were the adults in my life as a kid are more like older peers than ever before. I am in the midst of growing in friendship with people, but it feels like I am a seed that is sprouting but has not yet fully taken shape.

I am trying to reconcile two strong but seemingly opposing traits in myself--my high sensitivity and my high sensation seeking (see the links for more clarification on these if you're curious). These two parts of me can feel like two different Elizabeths that are easily annoyed with each other. Me, myself, and I are working on domestic relations lately. How can I be a thriving sensitive sensation seeker?

So, in so many ways, right now, I am in the middle. I am so aware of being on my way, but also not at my destination. I seem to be in a season of waiting, maybe a season where seeds are being planted and growing, but I can't see what the harvest will bring and I just have to trust that the Great Farmer knows what he is doing.

I think one of the biggest challenges of this season is that it is, in so many ways, hidden to the outside world. Like those planted seeds, I see--when not being lied to by Satan or my flesh or the world--that the work I am doing is of value and great weight, but so much of it is unseen at this stage, and unrealized. I am writing a book that no one but I have read. I am raising a man who is, at this point in his life, still very dependent and living hidden under the sheltering presence of my husband and me.

I don't know what else to tell you. I don't have a lot of results or conclusions to show for myself right now.

I hold no blueprint in my hand. I am someone else's. This life is someone else's. And I am learning to recklessly put all of my heart, all of my dreams, all of my doubts, all of my confessions, all I am and have, on this one God. He has to come through, or I am lost.

Because that is a kind of abandon that is not reckless at all.