This weekend, we move our oldest son into college. I remember when I first went to college. My dad was a wreck. Like, a total hot mess wreck. He kept walking up to me, patting my head, and sighing. It was like I had some terminal condition, and I found it more cloying than charming. Of course, he didn’t talk about it–just stop, head pat, sigh. Finally, after I’d been at school a couple of weeks, I called to check in and we both sobbed into the phone until my mom got home and my dad tossed the call to her. It was absurd and funny, but now that I’m on the other side, it makes a lot of sense.

Launching kids is hard, and it seems completely unfair that it comes at that precise moment most of us are reaching mid-life. This confluence of change has left me feeling adrift. While I knew that my kids would grow up one day, and that I wouldn’t always be 28, it never occurred to me that this would take place NOW.

Over the past few months, I find a weird dichotomy taking place within. While I am highly cognizant of the passing of time and feel the need to “do the things” before the hourglass empties, I’m also spending more waking hours than normal reliving my past. Memories that I thought were just a few years ago, but I now realize were eons, flood my mind, and I find myself crying as I recall high school slumber parties, my childhood friends scattered around the floor in sleeping bags, talking, laughing, being young. There’s a literal feeling of mourning as I reflect on this time that was and will never be again–for those friends who are no longer with us, and also for the absolute freedom of standing in the middle of a wide-open road that beckons to the future with unlimited possibility.

As Katrina Kenison writes in The Gift of an Ordinary Day, “It is almost unfathomable that more than a quarter of a century separates me now from that teenage girl and her half-formed dreams. Harder still to believe that she’s grown up to be me, a middle-aged mother of two…”

Preach, sister. Yet even though we’re at the end of a season, I also feel myself at the precipice of a beginning, which can be just as confounding and heart-wrenching as the end. I suppose it’s because both end and beginning are part of the same movement–you can’t have one without the other. And while I keep looking for the beginning, I’m not quite sure where it starts. My husband is off on a new adventure–organizing, building, connecting within the community as he seeks to start a new mission. And while I’m whole-heartedly supportive of this endeavor, it’s not my dream. It’s not my beginning.

And so, I wait. And as I wait, God is reminding me, almost daily, that his plans require patience.

In Joshua, the promise God made to Abraham is finally fulfilled. Centuries have passed. People have come and gone. The world has moved on. God’s promise so long ago seems like the stuff of legend. It’s a good story, but not likely to be. But then, after Isaac and Jacob and Joseph and enslavement and freedom and Moses and the wilderness, God says it’s time to go. There is a promise to keep, and all is now ready.

God doesn’t care about time–at least, not in the way we care about time. He’s not going to hurry his plans to meet our desires because he knows what needs to be done and how it needs to be done and, sometimes, it takes a really long time. Look at the history of the universe–talk about playing the long game!

American writer Wendell Berry states:

I would argue that when what is known reveals itself to you, it is not by chance, but by God’s beautiful infinite design. And it comes when God is ready.

Blessings and Peace,

Sara