how lucky I am!!

How lucky I am! How lucky I am to be relentless with my love and to drink it by the mouthful! To slide down snow, run for miles on miles on miles, flex my muscles in the mirror, make silly faces in windows, to clobber you with the biggest bear hug you've ever had when you walk through the door! To see the sunrise! and the sunset! to dance ballet! and swing off ropes and climb up rocks! to unapologetically use exclamation marks! and apologetically ask to be friends again! I believe in second chances! And that people can change! I believe I can change! I have changed! And it is a function-- not a flaw, a beautiful function-- to believe in that and always, always, always get back up. oh, how good it is to be living this lucky little life I have! I drink whole milk and eat cookies! after 8pm! 

It is wonderful! I am dreaming and am wide awake! This is my life! All these good and perfect little things land like butterflies on my fingers, and I get to watch them with my bare eyes! This is my life!

oh, goodness gracious, what a year it has been, and look at how much I am breathing. See how wide my eyes are set as I try to take it in. My life is good, I have nothing to lose. My life is good, I have everything to lose. What mess of contradictions tucked inside my pocket. 

I called my pastor from college awhile back,  a couple years ago, to ask for his advice about a few things going on in my life. With a chuckle, he said, “You know, DLP, I am excited for the time in your life when things can finally settle.” It was true. For nearly ten years of my adult life, it felt like every year I was dragged into another season of this poorly written CW TV soap opera, and every season finale, you kept on thinking, “surely, now this is it; it can’t get worse than this!” only for it to end on another cliff hanger.

But the sun has begun to set on my 27th year, and it is twilight for 2025. For once, things feel slow. Relaxed. Like I haven’t just come up for air, but have beached, pina colada in hand. 

Now, don’t get me wrong: 2025 added plenty to the plot. I lost a job, processed a life taken too quickly, was unhoused for several months (I had never felt more in touch with my Subaru), and had one too many well meaning people stir up more fear and anxiety than either they or I had intended . Yet a couple months later, I got my dream job, have my own apartment, and fell in the kind of love you can only do once because it feels impossible to have this kind of bravery, where you’re brave to hope, and all you can do is hope to love for a long, long time; yes, I am loved far more than I could have hoped. My life this year feels like the first and last stanzas of Job: God took, then God giveth back, with far more than we could have asked. It’s not the same as it was before, but here we are, standing.

Don’t worry, I don’t have a sermon in my back pocket about the sanitization of biblical suffering (although believe you me, I can speak in spades about it), or even how the flat church platitudes may even be right -- or even on what Job means! But the reason I have so little to say is boring, actually: through a career change, the melancholy of the death of a child, and the uncertainty of the next night’s bed, I found an unrelenting faith that I will be okay. God has done more with less. 

God has done more with less.

In the past, when life has hit me with a shovel and tried to bury me alive, I would repeat little mantras like this, and I repeated them, repeated them, repeated them, hoping that if I did so enough, I would believe them. I never did, but breathing them in and out was like grasping at a life preserver while being tossed in the night sea. 

This, though, was different. This was an abiding conviction-- nothing that I could prove, but something my heart was so staunchly committed to hoping that even though it took me about 100 days to finally sleep on my own bed and more than 150 days to walk into my new office for my first day, I could not convince it otherwise. 

God has done more with less.

If you’re saying, “Well, you gotta remember that it was also God who gave you all those problems to begin with,” I’m afraid I don’t have a better answer than what other Christians will parrot back at you: God’s power is made perfect in weakness (2 Cor 12:9), and that all of the gospels were written for the downcast and brokenhearted. Paul wrote letters in prisons, David wrote poems hidden in caves, and the church has a history of blossoming in times of hopelessness. 

But I was not in a prison, or in a cave, or even feeling hopeless. This year, you could not find me in the lion’s den or a burning furnace. No, I got to stand at the top of mountains and look out at everything beneath. Then, when I had eaten a full packet of Mott’s fruit snacks, slurped down a gel, and refilled my bottle, I got to look down as my feet hit the trail. Then, just as my lungs fill with one more breath, I would descend back into the forest. 

Here in Colorado, mountaintops, even in the summer, have a funny feeling of winter. The air is thinner, the trees, if any, more sparse. And right at the summit, it’s like the whole earth is taking a breath with you.

In the winter, the earth rests. Beneath the pillow and blankets of snow, the plants are resting. The groundhogs and the pikas and the bears burrow their holes and begin their hibernation. Buds are preparing for spring. All of nature lies in wait.

And what did that look like for me? 

Being at the mercy of my friends, and what merciful friends I have, who let me couch surf and opened up their homes before I needed to ask

Getting a full night of sleep and remembering that sometimes all you really need is a little nap and a snack

Running laps up and down Mount Sanitas, because try as I might, I am never giving up this sport

Evening cuddles where we finish two whole containers of berries, because we can, and there are no rules against each of us eating a whole basket in one sitting

Surprising calls from surprising people who used to be so important in another season of life. Now they just want to check in and say hi. Hi.

Affirmation Tuesdays! I love you, and I love being with you, and I love who I am becoming, and I love who we are becoming. And I hope to love you tomorrow, too.

So perhaps the gospel flourished during this time of life not because of all the things that happened that should have rocked my world, but because just like the angel gave Elijah some bread under the shade of a tree, God gave me enough quiet from the storm to close my eyes and feel the warmth of my breath. I have been given rest, just as the psalmist promised in Psalm 127.

Friends, winter has broken, and I am healing. I am turning my back to the summit and coming back down. Spring has finally come.