Just a Mirage

It is late, and I have to be at work early in the morning. I don't seem to care at the moment. The fan spins in the ceiling humming softly in the stuffy nighttime air. I lay awake thinking of when I visited my cousin a few weeks back and how we cooked a casserole in her tiny kitchen with of a plentiful supply of vintage Pyrex dishware, and how I just bought my first car. It cost me 3,500 dollars and it felt good handing over the check and taking the keys. The car has a black leather interior and heated seats, and a sunroof. I have worked a full time job in corporate America two years now. I drive myself to work blasting a full array of songs on the speakers with the windows down.

I think of just how far I've come in the past two years. God was providing for me the whole time. I knew it then, but I can see it clearly now. He provided me with an amazing car, enough money to start school, and a passion for teaching. I am ashamed to admit I had a bad attitude much of the time when I should have been thanking God for what I had been blessed with. He has shown me more grace than I ever deserved just in the past day -- much less the past two years.

I also wonder when I will meet a boy who steps up and asks me out. I wonder what God has planned for my future especially in that area. Will I marry a fellow, settle down, keep a farm, and have six children? Will I clean house, wash dishes, homeschool, and kiss my husband off for work? Or will I end up on my own, living in a brick apartment, teaching at a Charlotte Mason school, continue to pursue my photography, and spend my summers taking pictures and traveling? Will I come home, light a candle, cook supper for one, and grow old and wise all by myself? Will I have 3 cats, and go to the farmers market on the weekends, and take pictures of the people I meet?

I wonder what I will be doing in ten years time. Ten years ago I was twelve, in ten years I will be thirty-two. Time has a strange way of taking hold of us till all that we are is just a memory. Constantly it sifts us, changes us, without us even knowing. How different are we really from when we were children? We are still the same being with the same soul, thinking and dreaming and eating and working and living and breathing, yet we look back and somehow things have changed so slowly that we didn’t know it was happening. The scary and exhilarating thing is that I am now the adult. The person I would have looked up towards with a sense of awe and respect when I was twelve. I am that someday, that moment far far in the future. When twelve, that day seems so far out in the distance, like a mirage on a summer road, something that people say will come to pass but we somehow never believe it really will -- as if we will stay in perpetual childhood forever. 

And then it comes -- that moment when you first look around and realize that things are changing and it is a strange and exciting sensation. You can’t explain it, no one can. It just sort of happens one day. But time goes on and you forget the newness of it and you still feel like a kid deep down.

Once several more years pass and all your friends are getting married and having babies and moving out on their own and starting the beginning of their grownup lives you realize just how bizarre it is that you are indeed part of the grownups too. You don’t really feel like a kid -- not even deep down. You feel settled in your skin and eager to live your dreams that have been so long in the making. You make new ones. You dream bigger with some things, and let other dreams from childhood die and fade away into mere memories. You pay bills and deal with money matters. You feel stresses you never felt before, and less stress with matters that would have made you upset when you were younger. You reach out and dig deep. You realize that you must act now or things will not come to pass.  You feel very unprepared -- insufficient even. You begin to taste hints of accomplishments that took hard work to achieve.

You feel the need to go on adventures while you’re still young and to dig deep and settle down all at the same time. It’s the feeling of springtime and harvest. Springtime because you are just beginning to unfold your buds that have grown throughout childhood and are ready to blossom and produce fruit; and harvest because you feel all grown up and well rounded compared with childhood’s seedlings. 

You wonder when all of this will be just a memory too. Someday -- someday far away. So far even, it looks like just a mirage on a hot summer’s road.