Birthdays & Life Seasons

*Originally written on December 27, 2019 at the beginning of my Dazzling 37th Year Journey*

So my birthday just passed. I don’t start with this intending to solicit belated birthday wishes or gifts (though both are welcome 🤣), I say this because when my birthday approaches I find myself taking stock of my years lived, like I assume a lot of people do. Unlike some women though, I don’t care who knows my age, each day I have lived has added value & experience, carefully crafting me into the person God made me to be. Ten days before Christmas this year I turned 37. Before I go forward though, let’s go back…

30 didn’t scare me. I arrived at my 30th birthday in good spirits with my life.

After a different start to my 20’s than I had anticipated for myself as a child, I had pleasantly managed to end up closing out my 20’s in a far more whole & happy version of myself than I would have guessed possible. Especially with the trajectory I had set myself on entering life as an adult.

God’s grace can be a beautiful surprise & much needed blessing for sure. When I turned the page in my life volumes and entered my 30’s, I was in, what I thought to be, a great place.

– My love story was in the best place it had ever been, and continually growing & strengthening.

-Though finances always made for unexpected challenges, we were getting by better and God was providing where we came up short.

-My family was growing, thriving & happy, plus we had navigated into being outnumbered by 3 daughters while still surviving. We were embracing the chaos & joy of it with God in our family’s driver seat.

-I was making a better effort, for the 1st real time since becoming a mother, to make time for me & my spiritual journey too.

All in all entering my 30’s felt like the best & brightest new page to turn. It was the easiest new volume to start in my life thus far, and I did so excited, focused on a new direction, exploring my goals & searching for my personal purpose again. I wasn’t just drowning as a mother & wife, by God’s grace, I was actually swimming.

Now the writer in me types this and immediately feels a little silly for not seeing it coming. The plot always twists when the story seems like it hits a happy place before the story is actually over. If my life were a novel series and we were in the middle of the sequel to my origination story, book #2 per say, it would be at the very moment that the lead character felt they had achieved success & contentment in life when the music would change and the plot would thicken. The villain would enter (or re-enter as it may be) to try to mess things up one more time. Evil never truly gives up after all and my story isn’t over yet.

Anyways. I feel like I should have expected it. I feel like I should have seen it coming and been better at preparing an action plan to prevent it, but I didn’t. Just as soon as I was getting a little comfortable in the “Season of Bliss”, tragedy struck, and then it struck again, too soon. I started to stumble as the ground around me started to feel more unstable every single minute. We walked through loss after loss, pain, grief, we just outright hurt. There were blessings mixed in absolutely, but the blows just didn’t stop coming, for 3 years, we just took hit after hit from life… each one feeling more devastating as the pain piled up.

Now I wasn’t completely foolish in my “Season of Bliss” and had made intentional choices, but even though I had equipped myself with tools to prevent complete annihilation of self when things got hard again, slowly, one by one these tools started to break, disappear or simply not do the trick anymore. During these three years, as things got harder, I got weak, then things continued to get hard. New losses. New trials. It just kept coming. By the time I reached the halfway point in this decade of thirty, I was completely broken again. I knew this.

-I knew I was failing myself & my family.

-I knew I was failing in maintaining myself.

-I knew I was failing in my faith & my purpose.

I knew I was failing God too, BUT then I remembered I was exactly where He wanted me, because He put me here and He doesn’t measure my success like I do.

-I knew everything that was still in my life was there because He put it there.

-I knew those that we lost, went as part of His plan, as painful as some of the losses were, it was still His plan.

-I knew that even though I was broken, He was whole.

-I knew even though I was weak, He was strong enough to carry us all.

-I knew that when I got paralyzed needing the details, He knew the details and was always ready for a prayer conference where He would share what I needed, not what I wanted.

-I knew that though things had been hard, I had never once doubted that He was good or stopped clinging to His promises.

This reminded me of His unending love, and the last one alone, reminded me that I was still growing even in the pain, because a younger me turned away from Him when life got hard, and Satan kept me away for much of my teens & twenties before I found my way back to my Savior. This 35 year old me, may have cried, screamed, and been angry with Him, but I turned it all to Him instead of turning away.

And that my Dazzling Dolls is a Spiritual Progress… A Success…

It was at that point when I realized that even though I had entered my 30’s ready to go and excited about life, I needed to do a better job taking care of the basics for me. You see at my lowest points in the daily grind, I let go of me, like so many people, especially women. The better job I do with the basics of self care, the more equipped I am to battle the enemy. The enemy goes for the weakest spots in us. My weakest spot is my brain, my mental illness, my head injury trauma, my life traumas & my prewired by God personality traits that all combined make me somewhat easily susceptible to attacks if I am not proactive. Like VERY proactive. Sadly so much of this I didn’t understand as I entered my 30’s bright eyed & bushy tailed.

I went from being a daughter to raising a daughter and that had not left me much time to figure out what worked for just little old me. I didn’t really know who I was, I didn’t really know what I wanted and I had never really realized I needed to figure that out, before I was responsible for another life.

I decided that the halfway point of my 30’s was as good a time as any to begin really devoting time to getting to know me. I had been a daughter, I had become a mother and wife, I had been a sister, I had been a friend to others countless times, but I had never just been me. Every season of my life up to that point I had been what other people needed me to be & I had never prioritized myself before any of these titles.

For the last 2 years I have been making a concerted effort to prioritize myself first, for the benefit of myself and my family. I began by stripping away the titles and labels the world has placed on me. I may be all those titles, but before I was any of them I was the baby God knit me to be, and I had no real idea who that was or what He may have knit me together to become.

I am happy to say that after almost 2 years of dedicated focus & devoted energy spent studying me, I am finally beginning to feel a little bit confident in who I am again, behind all the titles. At my core. In my heart & with an optimistic spirit. I am beginning to understand my talents, my skills, my hobbies, my personality & my purpose beyond daughter, wife, and mother. I still proudly carry all of those titles but now I know that I deserve to wear those titles, those titles don’t wear me.

As I soar into my “Power Year” or my Dazzling Power Year as I am calling it, I am beyond excited to see what God has on the horizon for me & my family! The time is now! His plan is piece by piece being revealed and I am devoted to walk in faith, without fear, owning my story, for HIS glory!

Stay Strong in your Faith my Dazzling Dolls!

~Rebecca