What a year!
Okay. It’s 1:35 am on December 31st and I’m feeling so sentimental about this year. I just spent a whole day with some of my best friends who know how to celebrate me so well. (I think I’m starting to love having my birthday as one of the last days of the year btw.) These are people I used to walk and do life with everyday in year(s) prior. However, a lot has changed this year. This year, 2024, I packed up my life in Lubbock and left. I moved away from people I couldn’t possibly love more even if I tried. I moved away from a place that has felt so safe and easy. I moved away from a place that the Lord used to completely transform my heart into something I could never make it to be on my own… and I found myself in a little town on the Guadalupe River. I didn’t know what emotions to feel when this change happened. So much excitement and sadness and hope and heaviness. I remember being overwhelmed by so many feelings as I knew my time in this sweet place was coming to an end. Almost immediately leaving Lubbock, I was met with a safe landing pad on the Frio River. This place is no stranger to me and has always been a place where time stands still and the rest of the world doesn’t matter. Praise God I got to spend three months in a place like that during this action-packed year. After camp, life hit again, and I moved to Kerrville to start my new job. Not sure what this new adventure would look like, time and time again, God met me with assurances that everything was going to be okay and I would fit right into this town sooner than I thought. Dinner with friends, house-warming parties, co-workers turned best friends, Saturday trips to Comfort Coffee, new gym friends who give me fist bumps after workouts, development days with some people who mean a lot to me, walks on the river trail, YL club with high schoolers on Monday nights that have lead to watching their basketball games on Tuesdays, new friends getting engaged, Sunday evenings with my parents at their ranch, an old hymn at my new church, a call from a friend, getting obsessed with the NBA, lunch with my mentor while we catch up on life, making a pour over at work, or even just a pretty Hill Country sunset. I can see Him in all of these moments reminding me as He always does that He is with me and to not be anything more than who He created me to be. To just be. I think this is my New Year’s resolution simplified. This next year I want to just be. Kinda like this last year honestly. But maybe and hopefully, I’ll resist a little less and stop fighting against my humanness. Recently, I’ve been thinking so much about how sin entering the world made it hard for us to be human. To be who we were truly meant to be. And I think that this next year, I want to lean into what that might look like. I’ll start with seeing what all the Lord has to say about it and go from there. Maybe I’ll become more self-aware this next year, or grow in humility and interdependence, or conquer old struggles and gain new ones, or start loving the limitations of humanity, or find something else I’m really passionate about (CrossFit Christian Influencer??). Who knows?! At the very least, I’ll spend some time with a God who has never changed and never will. And I’ll just be. And I think I’ll be okay with that.
