Time Flies As Life Crawls By

Have you ever written or seen a date and immediately flashed back to another time in which that date was significant to you?  Dates are possibly one of my favorite things, they mark a passing of time, and they remind you of what was and push you to what is to come.  I can tell you the exact day and time (within a few hours) that Ian told me he liked me, I know the day my vertigo settled in for the long haul and when I received the love of Jesus and asked him into my heart.  Today is another one of those significant dates for my life; on February 25, 2009 I embarked on the most life changing adventures of my life.  Four years ago today I began my journey to New Zealand where God would take my heart and wreck it once again for Him, the day when my life truly seems to have begun.

My immediate thought when I realize four years has passed is that there is no way that much time has already passed but then that is quickly followed up with I can’t believe it has only been four years!  In four years I have travelled to the ends of the earth and back, met the man of my dreams, fallen in love, gotten married, had our first son and I am currently carrying our second.  There are days that feel like they go on for weeks, yet there have been weeks that feel as though they disappeared with a blink of my eye.  I do not understand how time can feel as though it is speeding past us as life moves slower than molasses.  I remember waiting for that first kiss from Ian how life could not seem to move slower yet when he did finally kiss me it was as those months leading up to it were suddenly put on warped speed and smacked me in the back of the head in the midst of our kiss.  Looking back I feel as though I barely knew Ian when we stepped out of purely friend zone and into a more intimate relationship; at the time I felt as though I had known him for years but in all reality it had only been a few months.

Time is relative in its own weird constant state.  Although the passing of time will never change, there will always be 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, seven days in a week, 52 weeks in a year and so on, how we perceive it will.  As a child the school week was always a thousand times longer than a week in summer and I don’t think our mindset ever really changes.  In the course of learning time seems to drag, yet when you look back from the fruit-filled end (ex: the last day of school) it often feels as though the process just began.  My six months in YWAM is much like that.  I vividly remember days while in New Zealand or in one of the other countries that were absolutely brutal; days that God was up-rooting, pruning, tilling and planting but at the end when I looked at all the fruit that had sprung up in the process it all seemed worth it and the time suddenly the time that had passed did not seem as long, but on the contrary it felt too short.  There are days when I see new fruit from my time in YWAM and it feels as though I was just there learning but most of time it feels as if it was a lifetime ago and my heart longs for those friends I so quickly bonded with.  Like this girl, Rachelle . . . 

I am utterly astounded at where I am today four years later.  Life before YWAM is merely a distant fuzzy memory and everything that has followed has been monumentally life changing – like meeting and falling in love with this guy . . .Us getting married . . . 

The arrival of Judah . . .

Celebrating his first year of life . . .

Finding out #2 is on his way . . .

If you had asked me the morning I left for New Zealand where did I expect my life to end up in four years I would have said overseas serving the Lord or in school planning to go back out.  Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I would be laying in bed watching my stomach move from my second child kicking me while listening for my son to wake up so we can play.  I am so grateful that my life is Nothing Like I Expected.