This Pearl of Great Price

This life is the only one I get.  I don't think I fully understood that in the early days.  I was convinced I could do anything I wanted to do and could be anyone I wanted to be.  Life seemed to be limitless, and whatever limits I encountered could be overcome with enough persistence and will.  But lately I realize  there are things about myself I cannot change.  I cannot do anything I want to do, and I cannot be anyone other than who I am.  I am learning to recognize the perimeters of my own being.  This is who I am; at midlife those lines are holding hard and fast.  It is unlikely that I will become a different person, ever.

Even as a child I remember wanting to be another kind of somebody:  somebody with straight blond hair; somebody tall; somebody outgoing and unafraid; somebody athletic; somebody different from who I was.  These desires never really went away.  They sometimes just found new ways to express that same inner contempt for the familiar.  I kept trying to figure out how to escape the raw materials of personhood I started life with.

I think that part of holiness is learning to live within the limits of one's own being, to honor one's own unique equation of person-hood resolving itself within the world of one's community.  As I am learning how to do that, I've had to allow some dreams and ideas of who I should be or who I should become to fall away.  I am learning to stand solidly upon the holy earth of the life I already have.  This life is holy.  This life, this body, this family, this marriage, this work--all of it sacred.  The choice I wake up with everyday is this:  will I honor the life I have?  Will I make it a beautiful one or will I disparage it because I landed in a place I didn't anticipate?

God gave me this life.  God absolutely gave every single part of it into my hands, with full freedom to make of it what I would.  This life is gift.  God gifted me the raw materials of personality, ability,  intellect, creativity, and body.  God designed the dimensions of each one.  And with the gift came the  complete freedom to squander all of them.  I never realized that manipulating myself into another me was a vandalism of God's creative process.  Now as I give myself room to breathe,  the truth of my soul illuminates what is mine to live and what is really just me trying to dress up in something that doesn't really fit.

Even the scars are sacred.  It is a mystery really.  I didn't choose to be broken in just the ways I have been.  But I cannot pretend that my brokenness didn't happen; my life is marked in irreversible ways.  The vulnerabilities that have come forth as a result have shaped the contours of my soul as much as the attributes I arrived on the planet with.  The paradox is that most beautiful parts of my story flow from the losses and heartaches.  The restorations and redemptions would not exist otherwise.  The compassion and empathy I feel for others would be hollow otherwise.  I would not know how to gently hold the tender soul of another if I were not also well aquainted with my own tenderness.

It seems that welcoming home the prodigal parts of my soul is a great way to start the second half of my life.  To recognize the great value of the one life I've been given.  To celebrate as infinitely precious the loves I spend my days with.  To honor the work God has clearly given me, even when it is shaped differently than it was twenty years ago.  To stop fighting the grain of my personality and to receive with joy the quirks of who I am.  This is my pearl of great price.  But it is worth everything I've left behind so that I can open my hands with gratitude and receive each Holy gift.

And so I begin a new blog.  I guess I am searching for fine pearls among the familiar.  They have been here all along and I just didn't recognize their beauty and worth.  I kept a blog for many years called "The Road Less Traveled."  I guess it was my way of trying to find a path I could trail blaze, leaving behind what I already knew so I could become something better.  There has been value in that for sure, because it contained a whole lot of character development.  As I used to tell my students when I served in campus ministry: God is really into character development.  But now I realize that God is trying to develop my character at home, in my own skin, with my own people, among what is familiar, humble, and ordinary.  This is not a journey of the unknown.  This is a holy reunion.  It's been so long since I have written.  After two years of silence, this is my reawakening.  Hello bright world.  I've missed you.