For life.
I seriously envy the day when my only problems and concerns involved trying to wrap my head around the 15 different kinds of blue in the Crayola box and remembering not to pick my boogers in public.
Because the latter will cause lots of teasing and basically be the end to your elementary school life.
Not that I know this from personal experience. I was just a witness to this very phenomenon and heard the kid ended up somewhere in Alaska. Apparently that's where they send the booger pickers.
For real, though. Life was easy back then. Our only jobs were to go to school, do our homework, and be nice to the curly headed annoyance that sat next to you all year.
Piece of cake.
What they failed to tell us was this:
If I had known this little fact, I would have intentionally failed every grade.
Like, five times.
The truth is, sometimes being a grown up stinks. Sometimes there are problems too big to wrap my head around. Sometimes there are situations that are completely out of my control and no matter how hard I try to manipulate them, they remain out of my control. Sometimes life takes its course and you have to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Because you can't go back. You can only go forward. Step by step by step.
Moving has been like that. Along the way, we've run through some wide open doors of opportunity and faced a few scary beasts of adversity. We've worried about our finances. We've had everything that could break or cost us money do just that. We've faced our fears about the unknown and stepped into the water with trepidation.
There are still uncertainties. There are still moments when we both think, "Should we have done this?... Did we just make the biggest mistake of our lives?"
What I've learned through this move (and what I'm still learning as we continue to make this transition) is that things don't always go as planned. Things break. Situations don't work out like we thought they would. Challenges arise that demand our time and attention. Doubt creeps in and attempts to set up permanent residence in our minds.
Life isn't perfect. It's messy and complicated and you can't write the script to it. You can't manipulate it into your expectations. You just have to live it - one day at a time - and trust that God is walking with you even through the yucky stuff.
Because sometimes you have to go there before you can get to the good stuff.
{I like to think of it as God testing our Herculean strength. Although He may have forgotten that muscles tend to deteriorate when they are living a life of comfort. So right now, we're probably peaking at the strength of a 90 year old.}
I've doubted a lot through this process. I've thought about going back more times than I can count. And now that we're here, that hasn't changed. Life was good. Life was comfortable. Life was easy. It wasn't drenched in uncertainty. It wasn't walking the tight rope of "what if". It wasn't depending on anything but our own strength.
Which is probably why we needed to move. It was time to step out of the box and lean on something other than ourselves.
I look at my youngest brother (also known as Little Josh...since we have like 5,000 Josh-es running around here) and think about how easy his life is right now. I think about how his biggest problem (at the moment) is figuring out how to build a cardboard car so he can ride it down the driveway on his skateboard.
Racing Jack (my other brother), might I add. Who has a real car. Which Josh wants to race. Down the driveway.
{Actually, when I think about it, this could be a potentially very BIG problem.}
When I think about it though, I wouldn't trade my life with Little J's. Not in a heartbeat.
Because the struggle of "growing up" is what shapes us. I am not who I was yesterday because of what I'm going through today.
And that makes it worth it.
Despite the allure of eating paste in the classroom and living with my parents for the rest of my life.
{Which, when I think about it, is probably the reason I wanted to grow up in the first place.}
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