The Sum of it All

At almost seventy, life is good! Really it is. It's rich and full. My senses are alert to sights and smells and all sorts of beauty. Spring is rich and verdant. Breathtakingly beautiful. Flowers of pink and yellow have poked their shy heads out to the sunshine. A purple bloom is struggling desperately to be seen in the midst of tall, thin blades of grass. I am content with who and where I am.  But what makes life delightful and meaningful is deeper still.

It started over fifty years ago. As a quiet sixteen-year-old girl, I thought of myself as plain. I lived in the shadow of a drop-dead gorgeous sister two years my junior. I was afraid of my shadow. She was afraid of nothing. I had a handful of friends. She had tons of friends who congregated at our house often. I just hadn't caught on to the whole social thing. I felt like I was supposed to be her, but I was a failure at it.

Add to that the cheating that the whole Latin class was part of. This included me. The teacher, who was elderly and never left her desk, had us exchange papers and grade each other's tests. I knew it wasn't fair to treat the teacher that way. It wasn't right, but who didn't want a 95 or 100 on every test in that "boring" class?

I had a boyfriend who was a bit of a rogue. I knew hanging out with someone who was a rule breaker was a bad idea, but who didn't want a boy's ring on her finger, with layers of tape wrapped around the other side to make it fit? Around this time he was demanding more physically than I felt comfortable with.

I became tired of being known as smart. I stopped studying. I made my first F on a test ( in Algebra 2). I shot myself in the foot, with this anti-studying routine, and lowered my grade point average for college.

Life was the funnel of a tornado, tossing me and all these issues over and under and around and around. Should I smoke like some people did? Should I try to conform to doing, wearing, saying and thinking like everyone else? Who was I really? Who was I supposed to be?

A friend asked me to a Bible study some girls were having. This was great, I thought. I had been brought up in a church- going family. I knew all about the Bible. I would really impress them!

But when I got there, I found girls I looked up to as upperclassmen. They didn't know all the facts about God. Instead they knew HIM. He,was as real to them as any person in the room. He was actively involved in their lives.

That afternoon, the tornado stopped swirling. Like Dorothy finding herself in the Land of Oz, I found bright sunshine and rich, vivid colors inside, in the presence of a mighty God, who cared passionately about me. All the facts I had learned about Him now became real. He had been waiting for me all along.

The  pieces of the puzzle I had been stressing myself out about, came together. I was now the daughter of the King of the universe, precious in His sight. My name was now written on His hand. I was important, not because I was beautiful or assertive or smart or somebody's girlfriend or even as a church goer, but because I was His.