Every now and again, I’ll get a notification from WordPress about stats about this blog and then I remember that this online space even exists 🙂 Does anyone even read blogs anymore? The other day, I took a trip back memory lane on here and had to smile at the younger versions of myself.
One of my coworkers asked the other day if my 20’s or 30’s were more fun. It was a great question and I’ve been thinking about it a bit recently. I told her that the 20’s were fun in that the world I was entering was brand new for me as a brand new adult and there were adventures to be had and opportunities to seize. It was the time for asking all the big questions and testing all my theories. Like all young adults, I thought my generation was at the cusp of answering the critical moments of the time. We had the starry-eyed vision of every generation of excited, naive youth. The course of this blog runs that gamut of idealism and hope and cultural diagnosis.
And then, you know, the real world hits you and you realize that it’s not quite as simplistic as it seems. Human nature is still more or less the same as 2,000 years ago, in spite of all the personality tests and naming and explaining of behaviors and patterns.
Around the time I turned 30, i dealt with a bit of disillusionment. What I thought were good answers to problems wasn’t panning out, and where did I fit into all this? This is not a unique problem, but when you’re not married and don’t have children, it seems to make the question more poignant and glaring.
That’s been a few years ago, and I’d say the past few years have seen me really settling into my faith, and feeling at home in the world around me. While it’s true that life is significantly more complex than I understood at 20, in many ways it’s also simpler. There are still questions I don’t have answers to, but they’re not my most important questions. Those questions have been answered and have helped me construct a framework from which I engage the world, make decisions and live with the flavor of abundance and contentment. It’s not perfect, but it’s been tested and it holds.
In the age of digital and social abundance, with the podcasts, and the lectures and the blogs and the movements and the pressure to somehow engage with it all, I’m trying to live by a very simple philosophy:
I will do my best with what I have and with what I know, right here, right now.
Because of the plethora of resources trying to tell you what to be concerned about and outraged over, and the support communities that form around them, it’s easier than ever to be one-trick ponies. One-issue people.
I’ve decided to take inspiration from my garden, instead, and live as a Good Gardener. Those whose visions are healthy, abundant gardens learn how to fertilize, get rid of pests, stake the stragglers, and protect from elements. A person obsessed with removing pests is not guaranteed a nice garden and neither is the person who can’t seem to put down the Miracle-Gro. The good gardener knows all of those are required, but she can’t just do one for a healthy garden.
Unhealthy, terrible movements are born out of one-issue kinds of problems, because the solutions don’t take into account the supporting issues, and the toxicity of the solution taken to the extreme.
I think I’m less concerned about the cultural noise and more interested in investing where I am, in ways that I can, that are both faith-filled and forward-looking.
I love seeing God’s movement in the world around me, His age-old ways confirming their truth and that’s been the best part of settling into faith. I’m reading through the Bible with an unchurched, Bible illiterate friend, and seeing His plan from eternity past through a brand new set of eyes has been hugely encouraging to my faith.
This summer has been a happy, humid blur of normal life and lots of flowers. I’ve enjoyed arranging and selling the arrangements locally. The tending of the garden, the commitment to it’s thriving in spite of the bugs and the triple digit heat numbers often had me thinking of that simple line from “Children of the Heavenly Father”-
God His own doth tend and nourish, in His holy courts they flourish.
The careful, faithful tending and care by God mirrors my own desires for how I care for myself and those around me. Encouraging and supporting the good, ridding myself of the bad, and trusting Him for the parts outside my control.
This post is also for the record. It’ll be interesting to see if the 60 year old Vicki will still identify with this, or if she’ll have learned something else 🙂
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