Fifty????? Already?????

This month marks my 50th year on this planet. Sometimes I feel like I want to celebrate this jubilee year, and at other times it is a staggering thought, one that takes my breath away to think that so much of my life has already gone by.

In an intentional effort to be more transparent, I want to let you in on some personal reflections on this season of my life. As a single woman, soon to be fifty, I sometimes find it difficult to keep track of where I am on the time line of my life. Because I am unable to mark the passage of time based on milestones common to most (on things like engagement, marriage, children, grandchildren, empty nesting etc.) Life can, for me at times, tend to feel like an uneventful and slow running narrative, a novel void of defining chapters. This can be good and bad! For example, how can it be that I am so much younger in my head than the calendar and the mirror tell me? In my personal reality I feel I am only 28 with 22 years of experience!

For a while now I have carried around a Max Luccado quote in my planner that summarizes Jeremiah 29:11-12 in a nutshell. It reads:

“ Your life has a plot, your years have a theme.”

This reminder really encourages me! I must daily remember that there is One who is ordering my steps, orchestrating the music of my life even when the notes sound dissonant at times. I don’t know about you, but in reflecting on time gone by, I would be tempted to despair if I did not believe that God is working every thing in my life out for His good, even the things I have identified as failures, wasted time, or missed opportunities. As I am out and about tending to the Father’s business, I must remember that it is not so much where I find myself on this life journey, but how I travel, and even more accurately and more importantly, that I remember whose I am as I am going.

I am praying that as I celebrate my jubilee year, that I remember the gifts I’ve been given, all of them from the Father’s hands. I will remember too, on this jubilee birthday, that this woman’s soul will never lose it’s youth, that there are still plenty of dreams yet to dream, and that on God’s calendar, a thousand years are as a day gone by.

It is my prayer that my pondering on these things will encourage each of us to apply our hearts to wisdom and to more intentional living. Scripture does remind us that our lives are like a vapor, like grass, and flowers of a field- here one day then gone the next. But it also reminds us that there is a plan and call on our lives and that our years have plot and theme (even if we haven’t figured it out yet!) What a comfort to know that we can rest in knowing that the One who has begun this good work in us will perfect it in us until the end!

“So teach us to number our days, that we may gain
a heart of wisdom". Psalms 90:12

Till Next Time,
Peggy
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