Growing

today is my 34th birthday.  i'm sorry, did i just type 34?  geez, louise, when the heck did that happen.  i swear i just turned 18.  a great day overall:  read several chapters in my summer fluff novel, made homemade blueberry pancakes for lunch, played in the dirt, took a 2 1/2 hour nap, got take-out for dinner.  blissful.

i guess birthdays and new years always make me introspective for a minute, leading me to recap where i've been and where i'm going.  this has been a year of big changes and growing pains.  and i have this sense that god's using all this to get me where he's wanted me for quite some time now.  i'm usually slow on the uptake when it comes to listening anyhow and then the actual doing part, well i'm part of some procrastinator's paradise.  somehow, i have time for everything else, but the real change stuff gets pushed to the side.  it's hard and uncomfortable and it's not instantaneous and it requires paitence...all of which are accurate descriptions of breakfast time at my house, let alone my soul work.

how/where am i growing?  well, certainly in the torso region.  that's undeniable.  i think right now, i'm developing like a geode.  you know, one of those rocks that doesn't seem like much from the outside, but when you crack it open its chock full of gazillions of beautiful crystals. basically, i'm not doing much purposefully to grow.  i haven't connected much here in terms of groups or organizations or committees, if that's how you evaluate growth.  i haven't filled up an address book of friends, but the few i have made are keepers.  

what i have done is just take the time to experience the change.  to let myself take time to adjust.  to grasp the bigger picture.  and it hasn't been graceful or smooth or even joyful.  it's been a little lonely, a series of trials and errors and exhausting.  but at the same time, all the change feels right in alignment with where i'm supposed to be.  the move, the pregnancy, the kids' adjustments.  sometimes being where you're supposed to be is, at first, as uncomfortable as being where you don't belong.  but if you take the time to make a new you-shaped depression in the dirt, you'll find that it fits and it just takes patience to get over the transplant shock and time to be watered in.