Happy Birthday to Me.
Thoughts on making it through my second decade on this planet.
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Today, I asked a friend of mine what he did this weekend, and he said he couldn’t remember, not because of alcohol or anything, but just because he didn’t do anything significant. I read a book all about how to make sure that doesn’t happen last spring, and why it’s so important to do so. It’s called A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, and I distinctly remember a story of Don (the author) agreeing to hike to Machu Picchu with a girl he liked, and then realizing it was an incredibly difficult hike and he was incredibly out of shape. He trained for months and months, and when they embarked, he didn’t die during the hike and actually loved it. Them reaching the city itself was one of the most beautiful sections of the book, and I wrote next to it, “I want this.”
This summer, I interned at a church in “the wilds of Montana.” It was a pretty large church, especially for being in Montana, and so there were 15 other interns there with me. We were living about an hour away from Glacier National Park, but near the end of the trip, we had only gone to once. As such, we went again the last Sunday we had free. We ended up hiking to what’s called Hidden Lake (you can see the view from where we started at the top of the page). It was absolutely gorgeous and oh-so incredibly worth the two hour drive to the trailhead combined with the hour long hike in. We stayed there for about 20 minutes, and then people kind of started leaving in one’s and two’s to embark on the hour long hike out.
My closest friend there had walked off down the curve of the lake right when we got to the base of the lake. Just as the last other person left, I saw that friend out of the corner of my eye. He waved me over, and then turned around and started sprinting away. I ran after him (naturally), and we followed something that doesn’t even quite deserve the name trail to where the lake emptied out in a series of waterfalls. Essentially, the ground went from flat land to a sheer cliff in a curve over about 200 feet, and we hiked down it as far as we could. There was then a twenty foot drop to the next section of flat ground ahead, and three feet of thick underbrush separating us from the nearest waterfall. Without saying a word, I started wading through the brush (which turned out to be mostly thorns), and my friend naturally followed. Getting through it, I stripped off my backpack and my jacket and dunked my head under the frigid waterfall. That’s a tradition I’ve had since a trip to the Canadian Rockies at age 12, and it was the most incredible feeling ever.
I had to read the Machu Picchu part of the book for a class last night, and when I got to the lines I included at the top of this blog post, I started bawling. Reaching that waterfall in Montana was the culmination of a summer-long pursuit of a good story, just as reaching Machu Picchu represented the culmination of months of training for Don.
I watched a sermon a while back where the pastor brought three people on stage (it was by Steven Furtick if you’re wondering). He put one of them at the center of the stage facing the side of the stage, with the second person placed a few feet in front of the first. He indicated the first person, and said that’s where a person might be, and the second person is where we want to be. He said it’s easy for the gap between the two to look insurmountable, but then Furtick placed the third person on stage about twenty feet behind the second, and said this third guy represented where we were when we met God. That distance was huge, and it showed how far we had come since that moment.
Normally, my blog posts are about the gap I have in front of me. They’re about pain and critiquing myself, but also moving forward. That’s honestly what makes a good story, and I love writing them, but I think it can make me overly critical if I dwell in it too much. Especially now, I think it’s appropriate to dwell on the gap behind me considering my 20th birthday was last week. I’m realizing I have lived an incredibly good story thus far in my life. I speak enough Italian to get by. I’ve seen penguins march across a beach in Australia. I got to visit the Matterhorn, and I did all of that before finishing my second decade on the planet.
In celebration of moving into my 20’s I want to celebrate what I have behind me. I have had experiences most people on this planet can only dream of, and opportunities that they would kill for. They haven’t been risk-free by any means, but they’ve been worth it. I’ve struggled a lot, but those struggles have brought me to lean into God, and He has brought me to moments like dunking my head in a waterfall. I’ve heard Him speak, and I’m so thankful to know Him. He has grown me from a boy arriving at college just two years ago to a man today, and I think it’s made me a person others want to be like.
At the end of the day, I guess all I can say is thank you. To God, thank you for walking with me despite my own stupidity, pride, and stubbornness. You’ve blessed me in ways I can’t imagine or comprehend, and it leaves me in awe to think about the story you’ve given me to live. To my family, thank you for believing I was capable of greatness even and especially when I didn’t. You constantly provided me with a great story even when I didn’t know what a good story was, much less how to strive for one myself. To the Friday Five, thanks for waking up early (especially you David) and blessing me with y’alls constant wisdom. To the wolves of Theta Psi, both past and present, thank you for welcoming me into the club. To all my friends, thank you for having fun with me and laughing at my jokes.
Last but not least, I want to throw a curveball. The biggest thank you I have is to myself. I’m trying to remember there’s a middle ground between self-criticism and pride. I err on the side of the first one more often than not, so this is my attempt to find that middle.
To Lorne, thank you for getting up early even when you didn’t want to, and didn’t really need to either. Thank you for forcing yourself to get to 10 pages a day in whatever book you were reading, and (almost) always making sure you spent time in at least one chapter of the Bible. Thank you for becoming more kind to people, and more outgoing in the process. Last but not least, thank you for living into God’s truth about you even when it was kind of terrifying to do so. It’s made for the great story you’re living right now, so keep it up.
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Originally published at theforlornemoose.wordpress.com on October 24, 2016.
