I remembered at 2:30 this morning that I forgot to post yesterday. When I remembered, I was lying on the floor of a church's fellowship hall watching Guardians of the Galaxy with forty 7-12th graders. We had an all-nighter from 7 pm to 7 am. At 2:30 am I thought, I could still write something (even though it's not Friday anymore, I still haven't gone to sleep yet, so maybe that counts?), or I could just close my eyes for a minute. To help me decide, I closed my eyes, just to see what that would be like. It helped, because I just kept them closed. It's true what they say, sometimes not making a decision is making a decision.
Let me tell you about all-nighters. They hurt a lot. Kids are so fun and have so much energy. Kids love all-nighters, and so I love scheduling them for the students at our church. The day after is pretty rough though. I took a four hour nap and since then I've pretty much moped around the house like I have the flu. I'm really grateful and glad we did it, but I also know that every year I do these, they hurt more. Some people call this AGING.
When I first started at Our Saviour's, I was 23/24 years old. We had a lock-in at church (if you don't know what a lock-in is, it's this: essentially you play games and watch movies and sleep on the floor). I brought a cheap sleeping bag and pillow and bragged about how I didn't need some air mattress. I was a little self-righteous and was convinced I was not going to be one of those adults that wouldn't sleep on the floor with all of the kids. Why do they want so much comfort? (insert laugh/cry emoji) Then, I tried to sleep on the floor. You know what? It hurt. Everything hurt. I barely slept two hours. My muscles hurt. I think my bones hurt. My ego hurt. I learned something that day. Sleeping on the floor actually hurts your body. And I was at most 24.
Now that I'm almost 30, I'm much older and possibly wiser (insert two or three laugh/cry emojis). I'm short and people associate being short with being young. That's really weird to me, because how many people do you know that just keep getting taller with age? They don't. I stopped growing at 13, like most women. Some people are 40 and they're 5 feet. Some people are 15 and they're 6 feet. After like 13, height is not a good judge of how old you are. So why do people tell me every week that I look like I'm a teenager? I'm not really sure. They should look at my face and the top of my head more. There they will find wrinkles around my eyes and six or more gray hairs. I had five and plucked them all, and then six took their place. They don't seem to be deterred by being plucked.
I'm in a weird time in life where I am starting to see different signs of aging and I'm starting to experience that feeling of wanting to just halt at 29, but at the same time regularly need to defend (defend sounds a little more serious than I want it to, but I can't think of a different word. Because I'm tired. From the all-nighter. Because I'm aging.) my "being old enough" to do the work I've been called to do. How can you be not old enough and not want to age at the same time? I always wanted to be someone who embraced every sign of aging, because it would be a sign of a life well lived. But, I'm human, and sometimes I don't want gray hair and sometimes I want to be able to stay up all night or sleep on the floor and it to not hurt. But, like my dad and the Rolling Stones always say, "You can't always get what you want." :-)
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