The old has gone....

I can hardly believe it's been over a week since I last wrote...it sure doesn't feel like that long ago.

Today I decided that life is just.... weird. Last night, while driving home from a friend's house, I took a look at my life up to this point and started to cry. Sometime this summer I have switched from being a child to being a woman. That's the way I understand it in my mind anyway. I softly cried... mourned... over the fact that life won't ever be what it used to be. I can't ever go back. Not that everything was fine and good before, and I'm very thankful for God bringing me this far, but this "new" me seems so different from the "old, more childish" me that I don't completely know how to reconcile the two. I see things - especially relationships - through a whole new (mature) pair of eyes. I see others more clearly, I understand more, I have the ability to think and ponder crazy things (unattached from my emotions and selfishness), I know what it means to depend on God for everything intrinsic to me. It's amazing and good, but not always comfortable because it's not completely familiar, and because I don't know (i.e. have fears of) how this is going to affect people around me that I love (which may sound ridiculous but is true) The change is so noticable to me that I'm pretty sure others will notice it too. I look at myself and think "is this really me?" when I know that, yes, it is.... It's me transformed by God, and believe me, alot of transformation has taken place this summer. So, I know that this is good, but at the same time sometimes I want both: what I used to have/be and what I am/have now.

This part of a song came to mind while thinking through these things. It sounds harsh to me, but it's true none-the-less:

"The past is tangible, I know it by heart,
familiar things are never easy to discard.
I was longing for some freedom,
but now I hesitate to go,
I am caught between the promise and the things I know.

I've been painting pictures of Egypt leaving out what it lacked.
The future feels so hard and I want to go back.
But the places that used to fit me cannot hold the things I've learned,
and those roads were closed off to me while my back was turned."


Except I'm leaning more towards the promise because I know it's of God, and am continually tasting how good He is. I know what it means to be free (have newness of life) - I've experienced it. Still though, it really feels like all this change has happened while my back was turned. I sure don't know what the future holds (it seems more unknown to me than ever before) and sometimes it seems very unfair that I can't go back to what I want to go back to (taking the new with me of course). The realization of what's happened was so sudden it was almost shocking, and I sometimes seem unfamiliar to me (yes, you read that right). But I know it's the Spirit working in me... I can tell by the fruit, and as strange as it is to me to understand things this way, I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

"Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come." (2 Corinthians 5:17)