winds of change & remembering

It's been a few months shy of a year since I wrote last! Life has been so full that, sadly, this blog had to take the brunt of the busyness, and now I've forgotten how to write. I hope you'll forgive me and work with my growing pains. I'm like someone who has forgotten how to speak, read, walk. The remembering is slow and painful.

It's fitting that this blog is called Turn the Page. I'd forgotten about that too. I started it when I began writing (reading?) one of the most important pages so far. The year 2009 was one of the fullest years of my adult life, in terms of change. I got engaged, was let go of my job, got married, moved into a new home and began a new life, my husband graduated and then found a job, then I graduated from college and a new job fell into my lap. All within a year. God is good. Now the pages are rustling again, and there is a breeze of change ahead. The corners of the next page flutter up, and sometimes I glimpse a word or two, and I am thrilled into the center of my soul.

I have realized recently that I always need change. I crave it and so I create it. I'm a daughter of a military man; change is the fabric of which I'm sewn. If changes don't happen regularly, there is an itchy crawly thought, wiggling the back of my mind, a nearly imperceptible movement out of the corner of my eye, telling me that I'm still exactly like I was last year and such a thing is unacceptable to a thinking, living person. Even if it's just forming a new opinion of some small matter, or discovering a new truth about the world, this is change, and it's necessary if I don't want to stagnate and mold.

Difference, then, comes easily to me. I've formed many habits and thought processes this past year or two, shaping them to be in agreement with my convictions and knowledge. I have changed the way I eat, the way I buy, what I want, how I see material things. At least, I feel like I changed all those things. A beautiful discovery I've made along that journey is that while I write my pages, God is holding the pen along with me, and has been all along. I feel like I am shaping my life and my self, but it's God who convicts, and then gives me the guts to make changes when others think my convictions are strange and must therefore be ignored.
It's nearly 2012 now. I am not one of those people who thinks New Years resolutions are something shallow or crude, something to roll my eyes at. Most years I make a list of things I'd like to do differently in the new year. But that list isn't much different than the one in my mind yearlong. I make changes in my life all the time, I have to, or I would wilt. But what better time than a fresh year to take a look around you, be honest with yourself, and fix what needs fixing?

I plan to get back into the habit of blogging this year. I want to do more work with my hands, sewing and crafting and getting those awful neck aches from looking at small things for too long. I plan to listen to more sermons by pastors I don't know personally. I want to learn the truth of hospitality and generosity, and put that into action, starting with my husband, then radiating out from there.

2012 is going to be full of change. I can feel the soft, subtle breeze from those fluttering pages ahead of me. I am growing older. My pen is ready.