nineteen.

The only time I've felt like this before is the last day of 2005. Tomorrow is my nineteenth birthday, and I feel like I've been eighteen for way too long. Without real reason I'm somehow feeling so ready, just hankering, for a fresh year with new things in it. So although things were incredibly different a few years (but long ones) ago, the feeling of waiting for a year to close, the quiet relief and excitement, is just the same. It's been a good year and an interesting one, nothing like any of the ones before it and in some ways a million times easier and clearer, but it's good to move on when a time is old.

I was talking with a friend yesterday, and I decided that nineteen is the best age to be right now: it's in a kind of hazy half-zone between teenager and adult, so I can pick and choose at leisure but partially have both for another year :) I also sense that the tone of this year will set the course for the start of my adult life probably more than many of my previous years, and I'm thinking a bit about this.

For the last few months, being in a totally different environment and also being on the other side of a few big things I've had to learn, a lot of the old anchors I've held have been taken away; I've had to be careful as I've explored life in the light of knowing God. That's been an important process and in the end it has strengthened what I value and the way I chase it, but now I just want to rekindle a heart that is always warm towards God, totally swept away by the assumption of his truth as it has been proven to me time and again--even though I realise too well how caught up I am in my culture and the not-yet-clarity of what I trust in. I am really willing to let him lead me through this ever-changing world that I could never grasp or be equipped for on my own. I'm so ready to re-route back onto a plane of simplicity, even within intricacy, and just start being more responsible in the little things that are clear to me at this point. That's what I hope will characterise this year, and I know that it's a fertile place for growing, learning, being challenged and vulnerable and being made soft and strong, more and more aware of dependence on his forever trustworthy closeness.