Peas, Sweet Peas

I know what the web address says, but lately my life hasn't felt particularly funny.  Nothing's really wrong, I've just been in a season of really thinking about my life.  For the first time ever I am really comfortable with where I am in my life.  Sure, there are always some things I would like to change (I wouldn't cry if I were four inches taller, many pounds thinner and completely out of debt), but I'm not unhappy.  This is a definite change over last year.  I look back on that time in my life, and while it wasn't all bad, it also wasn't all good.  Things now are so very different.

This last year has been a year of pruning in my life.  God has called me to look at what really matters and forget about the rest.  I believe that God doesn't forget even the most trivial details of our lives, but that He sometimes needs us to acknowledge that some things are just that.  I am just over the drama.  And from a drama queen of the highest ranking, that's kind of a big deal. 

In an quest to give me a drama-free (or at least drama-reduced) life, God has asked me to make a couple of really difficult choices in the last year.  He wants me to think about the kind of daughter, sister, friend, teacher I really want to be, then buckle down and be that person.  No excuses.  I want to be honest, kind, loving, real.  I want to be present in the lives of the people that I love.  I want to be a teacher that students will remember for how much I cared about them as individuals, even if they don't remember a single lesson I taught in my classroom.  I don't want to be bogged down in negative, bitter or filled with anger.  I see people like that now and think "How do they stand it?"  But I was one of them not that long ago.  It's an easy pit to fall into, one that takes a conscious decision to get out of. 

This kind of leads me to the other thing that God has asked me to do.  God has asked me to consider the company I keep.  God didn't point any fingers or anything of the sort.  What He did was just show me, in a way only God can, that not all people have good intentions and that even those who do aren't always good for me.  In truth, I am kind of a Pollyanna-type when it comes to people.  I like people to like me (even if I say otherwise), and I believe that most people are what they say they are.  But countless times over the last year, God has revealed that appearances are just that, and that sometimes the face we want people to see is so very different from our real motives or intentions.  I have been hurt by people I thought I could trust and had people who claimed to care about me turn their backs in the last year.  But ALL things work together for good.  I've never really believed that the way I do these days.

Sometimes it's hard to believe that I am happy.  I know that sounds crazy, but I have just never been satisfied with where I was.  I always wanted something more.  And there's nothing wrong with that if that longing is positive, if it leads you to strive for the things you want.  But it wasn't like that for me.  I always felt like I wasn't enough, that I was defective or less than everyone else.  For the first time in my life, I am at peace, no matter what storms surround me.  And after 28 years, that feels pretty good.