40 Years

I can't let this 40th-Year milestone pass without thanking God for the way He has so faithfully, steadfastly held onto me. I am thankful for Him making me His before I even remember anything of my life. I am thankful that as a child I learned and saw God as my Artist-Creator and as the High King, Resplendent and Terrifying and worthy of my deepest fealty. I am thankful that my home was filled with stories, music, beauty, books, books and more books. I am thankful for growing up in wide open spaces with wind and sky and seasons and growing things. I am thankful for tiny perfect strawberries from the garden and the first asparagus and sugar snap peas broken off the vine and young sweet corn. I am thankful for flat land and enormous skies that deliver storms and sunrises and winter stars like none else. I am thankful for thousands of piano lessons (and the occasional transcendant music performance that I was able to experience living inside/having my fingers give) and fairytales and lambs and baby chicks and horses and fabric and thread and paper and pencils and paints and scissors and tape and glue and cardboard and contraband kitchen knives for cutting. I am thankful for hikes in the woods and having wildflowers and mushrooms and trees and birds shown and named. I am thankful for cross-country trips to see mountains and waterfalls and lemmings and mountain goats and geysers and wonderfully hokey Corn Palaces. I am thankful for trips into the Big City (Chicago) to see the Moscow Ballet and Broadway plays at the Auditorium Theater. I am thankful for bike rides on loose gravel roads and four-wheeling on muddy dirt roads and wild roses and tiger lilies growing in ditches. I am thankful for college and the people I met who hunger and thirsted for Truth (lower and upper case), beauty and goodness. I am thankful for the Shawnee National Forest and Mammoth Caves and windy mountaintops in the Appalachian Mountains. I am thankful for tidepools on the English coast and poppies in Italian fields. I am thankful for Bald Knob Cross and God's severe and kind mercies in my despair and doubt and anger and great devouring sadness. I am thankful for all the loneliness and all those writers who held my hand through questions and longing. I am thankful for the letters that reached out to me from friends that God gave me at perfect times. I am thankful for Truth manifested and deliberately hidden; I am especially thankful for the books of Proverbs, Romans, Ecclesiastes, Psalms, Colossians and Philippians. I am thankful for C.S. Lewis, Elizabeth Elliot, Jerry Bridges, Madeline L'Engle, L.M. Montgomery, Annie Dillard, John Calvin, Dorothy Sayers, G.Campbell Morgan, Thomas Brooks, George MacDonald and teenage adventure novels. I am thankful for beauty in all her dresses and permutations. I am thankful for colors and lines and texture and physicality. I am thankful for faces and hands and bodies and walking and dreams about flying. I am thankful for Brad...for him asking me to marry him. For his courage and boldness and enthusiasm and optimism and realism and guy-ness and backbone. I am thankful for his steadfastness and steadiness and faithfulness. I am thankful for the sensuality and creativity of pregnancy and the heart-expanding meeting and knowing of our four children, Atticus Robert, Dietrich Lewis, Lincoln Carver, and Thea Belle Adelai. I am thankful for this full, three-dimensional, intense, heavy, normal, too-much, always-changing, inscrutable life that I am living. God has been and is kind to me. It is too much. I am so thankful that I can rest inside it, be needed, love and be loved, know and be known, see and be seen, learn and always be learning...and I don't need to utterly understand this, this my life or these, these my people. I can live this unfolding story inside it without omniscience and yet, still know something of it, and be learning ever and always. I am thankful that light eats darkness -- that love eats up fear -- that companionship and communion eat up loneliness; and there is more light, love, and communion and less darkness, fear and loneliness as year follows year. Thank You, King. Thank You, my kind and steadfast and strange and terrifying and beautiful God. Thank You....to be continued...