Considering how the twenties started out for me (not to mention all of the incredibly stupid things I did as a teenager) having just made it to 30 requires a little bit of gratitude and celebration on my part. So here's an early morning coffee toast to the fact that all the idiotic things I have done as a younger person did not have life long consequences and here I am, at 30 years old, sitting on the top bunk of a bunk bed, at my first Clergy Orders Retreat.
I can honestly say that I won't miss my 20s. My 20s were filled with incredible turmoil, lots of life change, and very little coping mechanisms to be able to sort through all the things that came my way. You might not know this about me, and I am currently wondering if you should, but there was a long period in my early twenties when living was not something I was very interested in doing.
My own unraveling began right after I turned 22, graduated from undergrad, and got married. John's mom once told me that she believed it was because for the first time in my life I felt safe letting all of the 'stuff' that I had been pushing down for so long bubble up. Of course, for me the problem was that once it started to bubble up it didn't stop and I had no way of knowing what to do with all of these bubbles besides to invite them to slowly swallow me up. It was a mess. I was a mess.
For almost three years, my life was like living in a dark room with no light. While in the background a recorder played scenes from my life, the worst ones, the most horrible things people had said or done played over and over in a dark room and a overhead voice repeated, "it's all your fault." And this might sound totally horrible to you, but I got to this place where I just wanted some peace. Some silence.
Because for so long I had lived as though I had control of all the ugliness around me. That I was some savior to the whole system I was a part of and that unless I could be that savior no one would value or want me. And my unraveling began when I realized, very truthfully, that I had saved no one. In spite of all my efforts and adaptations, many things that I had hoped to change would never change.
I will never forget the heart break on my husband's face when he had to walk out the door of an intreatment facility and leave me behind. And what a long journey followed of him driving me every day, for weeks, to treatment and faithfully for two years twice a week to Michelle's, my therapist across town. It was and continues to be a long journey. The adult child of an alcoholic. The adult child of divorce. The innate perfectionist personality. But mostly, and what got me through, was the identity of a beloved child of a God who even in my darkest and most hopeless moments never lifted the hand that rested on my shoulder.
And it felt like once I was able to accept God's continuous and persistant offer to hold hands, to join in partnership, and to see a sliver of what God sees when She looked at me, my twenties became very different. It meant that I finished seminary, began a career, became a wife and a mother, a friend and an aunt. It meant that what had seemed like a place where no fruit could grow and no happiness could exist there was an overabundance of joy and laughter and mutual connection. So my prayer for myself is that my thirties would be filled with big dreams and great peace. Hope for the future but happiness with the present. That I would be surrounded by the energy of children and the honesty of youth. To continue to live in a place of gratitude for the support and warmth of family and friends, closely connected to my husband, my soul mate, and my sister, my kindred spirit. That they would experience from me the unending grace and unconditional love that God pours out over me every moment of every day regardless of my level of awareness. And that in all things, I would be able to embrace my own humanity, my own mistakes, and my own self...dancing and laughing all the way to my 40s.
