Something I Am Thankful For

Original Posting: November 2011


This is not about what you've done

But what's been done for you

This is not about where you've been

But where your brokenness brings you to

~Tenth Avenue North, "You Are More"

The more I listen to this song, the more I feel this must have been written just for me. It rocks me every time I hear it; the video hits me in my heart every time I watch it, without fail.

–

As I am writing this, it is the night before Thanksgiving. I am home for the four-day weekend, and taking a much deserved break from constant homework and fretting over studying to express my thoughts in a way that's more meaningful than a Facebook status update.

This is only a brief respite; after tomorrow, which I am taking off from homework on pain of I haven't decided, it'll be right back to taking notes on the extensive reading and working on two big assignments for Philosophy (thank you, Father Pratt; really).

But that is later. Right now, I'm sitting here with my laptop on a tiny footstool which I have mounted over my leg. Mark Wagner is playing on my iTunes, and I have a big mug (not my favorite, unfortunately) of ginger tea at my right. After I finish this, I'll take off my current nail polish and redo it in a different color for the festivities tomorrow. Hopefully I'll be able to grab a moment to post this while I'm at Grandma's, but please don't be upset with me if this ends up being a few days late.

I'm not sure at this point where this post will go.

I guess the short of it is that I've been doing a lot of thinking about Thanksgiving lately. At first it was constantly on my mind because I thought my roommate from last fall would be coming to spend the break with me, but then it turned out she couldn't pull enough money together. We're hoping for March, now.

But Thanksgiving remained on my mind. I think it's because I was really looking forward to having the four-day break, to get ahead on my homework a little bit, and to get a break from my current roommate, and to maybe get started on my presents (most if not all of my gifts are going to be handmade this year).

But just now, as I sit here typing this up, I'm thinking about what Thanksgiving has meant to me at different points of my life.

Before I knew that I liked turkey, it was kind of a pressure. Everyone in my family would be enjoying the meal to the fullest extent, and I would be caught up in only mashed potatoes, jello, and cranberry sauce. Really, I only wanted the four days off from school.

Once my pallet matured, I finally began to look forward to the holiday for the reason many Americans do: the FOOD. Oh my goodness; white turkey meat; butternut squash; deliciously-herbed stuffing; PUMPKIN PIE. Not to mention nummy leftovers for days...

And you can bet I'll be bringing some leftovers back with me when I return to my dorm.

But this year, I started thinking about Thanksgiving for the name of it.

–

Even though both my parents grew up going to church, and they raised my brother and I with very Christian values, God didn't play an active role in our household. What I mean to say is, we never went to church; we never said Grace; we never went through any part of the Bible together. After I started going to a youth group a couple of years ago, I asked both Mom and Dad, nervously, if they were okay with me doing this. And you know what they both told me? They both said they wished they had brought me (and my brother) up with that experience. They both thought going to church would be good for me. And it has been.

Where I meant to go with that is, I didn't grow up knowing to be grateful for the things I had. I knew what it meant to count your blessings; I knew that you could be thankful for having every single cell of your body if you wanted to get extreme with it. I knew the pilgrim story. But I didn't understand the enormity of giving thanks to the One who brought you this far.

Anyone who's kept up with my personal life for the past seven, eight months or so knows that I've been having a rough time of it. I know there are people who have it much worse out there, but I want to make the disclaimer (if faulted) that hard times are relative. I was so unstable; I spent so long, so deep in that intense confusion, that I was terrified that I would never be able to get myself out of it.

Recently, I was spilling words into my diary because it had been a while. I wrote about how I felt like I'd forgiven my ex-boyfriend, and how I seemed to finally be over him, and how relieved I was that my personal struggles seemed to be melting away. I'd been writing in that diary a lot; I was more than halfway through with this one.

So, out of curiosity, I turned to the first entry to look at when I started. My heart almost stopped; I practically dropped the diary in shock.

The first entry was dated just three days after I broke up with my ex-boyfriend.

In six months, I had filled 60% of the diary.

My first diary took six years to fill; the second diary took five. All three are about the same size, maybe 4" x 5".

I couldn't bring myself to read more than the first couple lines of the entry. I'd gone cold, and I didn't want to read further lest I risk spiraling back downward again. Part of me wanted to stop the diary there. Just end it. Get a new one, to match the new chapter in my life. But I didn't want to leave the rest of the pages blank like that; it'd be such a waste.

So I picked up a whiteboard marker and ran it across the edges of the pages where my Season of struggle ended, and where my new Season began. When the diary is closed, a clear blue line marks the divide. On each of my diaries, I marked the starting and finishing dates on the first page, underneath the lines where you declare "This Diary Belongs To..." On the first page, for the first section, I wrote the end date. Then on the first page of the rest of the diary, I wrote my name out again, and the beginning date of the second section.

I'm sorry if that doesn't make a whole lot of sense... It's one of those things that's a little easier to show than tell, I guess. But it felt very symbolic to me. So I'm sharing about it here.

Maybe someday I'll have the courage to look at those pages in the first 60% of the diary. I pray that God will give me the strength when the time comes.

But... when I saw those few words that I did, read the despondency in them... I've said this before; I want to go back and rock to sleep the girl who poured all of those words out of her heart. Glimpsing that first entry made me realize how far I've risen up from rock bottom. I couldn't think anything; I was too stunned.

It's a long story that I've addressed in one form or another in several blog posts, and I'm sure I'll continue to talk about it for a while, because it's a period of my life that I know I won't forget easily. So I'm sorry if my constantly referring to it annoys anyone, but the simple fact is I'm still trying to understand everything that happened to me. I've already blocked a lot of it out, I think. It's moving behind me, like it should be, but now and then something will happen or someone will say something and I'll remember a detail and my mood changes. It's not going to go completely away anytime soon. There's a part of me that doesn't think it should; not until I can articulate what happened to sink me so low, and what happened to lift me back up.

It's easy to say that distancing myself from God for so long led to my fall, and that running to Him again pulled me back up. And honestly, that explanation works for me.

There's a voice that tells me I need to be able to phrase that in secular terms; maybe that's what I'm hung up on, and why I keep revisiting it all.

You know what? I think that voice is lying to me. It is the last remaining dredge of myself from when I was in a relationship with someone who absolutely refused to take God for an answer, and it needs to be put down because it is dragging me down.

All I can say with any certainty is that, after all the mental tricks, after all the peptalks I tried to glean from any source I could; I only began to transcend to where I needed to be after I made God a priority. He needs to be top priority; I confess I'm not quite there yet – and I could blame all the work I have to do for school but that's still not an excuse. Someone Who is around all of the time, seeing everything you do, Who you can't hide from, and for it all is ecstatic with everything you ever do and wants nothing but the best for you -- there is no excuse not to make Him top priority.

The other day, I was feeling really antsy; I couldn't concentrate on my homework because I was so excited about I don't even know what. Daddy God told me to look out the window, so I pulled up the blinds. It had snowed a few days previously, and though the snow had melted in a matter of hours with no chance of returning, the weather still looked snow-colored. Daddy said, "This is your life." And I felt so happy! I agreed; asked Him what He wanted me to do. He told me to go dance in it. 

Well, if you've never been to Washington or heard much about it, or if you've forgotten Washington is even a state (um, yeah, the West Coast isn't just California; don't forget about Oregon and Washington up here): Washington winters are cold. Though it's not as bad as Minnesota or Colorado (or the East Coast; woof), it certainly gets too cold to just go out and dance like a crazy person.

Long story short, I opened up a Christian radio station and had a spontaneous worship break in my dorm. I don't know what the people living below me thought was going on in my room, but I was having the greatest time! (Jumping up and down sounds very different from a squeaking bedframe, right...?)

Slightly off-topic, but it's relevant. When I went to Repossess in October (I don't recall if it's nationwide or not, but if you've never heard of it, it's basically a huge church service for Christian youth in the community), the pastor said during the sermon that God had given him a Word about a student rocking out in their dorm at college, starting their day by worshiping God. I completely received that word, and I receive it again now. While I hesitate at active worship in the morning (um, I don't think my roommates would appreciate being woken up at 6AM because "Beautiful One" came up on the queue), I did spend the first week or so of college listening to the Christian radio station while I ate breakfast. I'd like to do that again, but it tended to make me dawdle a little too much once I settled into the new school year. Maybe next semester...

Anyway, my spontaneous worship break made me think of that.

And to sum all of that up; God's become a priority in my life. Which is very good. I feel a lot better for it. I think the time may come soon enough, within a year or so, where I'll have enough confidence in my relationship with Him that I can include someone else in my life again. I'd really like to have spent a lot more time with my Bible, though. Maybe I can get on that over winter break. I don't think I'll be able to read the whole Bible (not without properly absorbing the Word), but it'll be a start. I recently joined Scriply, a Christian blogging community. One of my girlfriends told me about it; she writes a lot of commentaries, testimonies, all sorts of epic stuff. I look forward to when I feel like I have enough of a handle on the Word to be able to talk about it in my own way. Perhaps I'm there already and I'm just scared, but I know Daddy will call me to it when the time is right.

So... To abruptly get back to the topic... I hope it's clear enough how this entry all fits together with the title (ignore everything your English teachers ever said to you)...

What I am most thankful for is that I am here today, exactly as I am. I am thankful for the experiences I have had, regardless of how painful any of them might have been. I am thankful that I had the struggle, because I emerged from it a much stronger person. I learned a lot about myself through it all, including stuff I'm not sure I was ready to admit. I have a confidence that I definitely didn't have this time last year. I have a stronger sense of self-worth. I'm still introverted; I'm still not going to walk into a group of strangers (or even a strange party of one) unless you shove me into it. But I know I've changed; I know I've grown up. I think only time will reveal to me all the ways that this trial has shaped me, but why should I expect a seven-month process to turn up its rewards so quickly?

I am thankful to God, that He brought me through the most difficult Season of my life, into this new Season where I can feel so much Promise. I just know awesome things are in store for me, and the anticipation is exhilarating, when I stop to think about it.

This is my life. And I will dance in it forevermore.

Shine on~

♥Sarah