A Letter to 27

You started out in similar fashion as many of the years before you started -- me thinking that THIS would be the year.

You were gonna be the year that changed my status -- That changed the nudity of that left ring finger. You were going to be the year that I was able to finally stop praying so desperately within.

You surprised me a great deal, you know.

Twenty-seven turned out to be the year that changed the course with which my heart beat upon. The desires of all the anxiety riddled years before you came into a fine focus two months before the end and collapsed under the weight of more beauty and freedom than I ever understood to be relevant in this life.

You, year twenty-seven, put a screeching halt to all the amusing ways I presumed to know better for my life. You laid out the most magnificent of crashes and up in the flames of it all was the debris of everything I had clung to so tightly; with one fell swoop, my ideas of a life worth living were detonated.

I still find myself wondering if you had known of the ways you would solitarily wreck me so I could become a tailor fit human for the life being written for me.

You certainly never took it easy on me. You watched closely as I continued to make poor decisions, as I put my values and hopes on the line for anything resembling a loving human with a pulse. You stood to the side and watched carefully and then you ripped the seams out of what I had haphazardly strung together; you took a jagged edge to the horizontal slant of a twisted version of what I thought I needed.

You continually broke things down, made room for Someone more worthy of putting a heartbeat to the blinking cursor of my existence.

You followed me to India, 27. You flew across oceans and traveled through time zones and when I stepped off that plane in a foreign land littered with smells and sights and sounds I'd never had the intelligence to imagine, you ordered me to breathe.

And I did.

I breathed in and out came the knowledge that I was so twisted if I was under the assumption that I had a clue about what was good for me. I breathed in and finally saw that I was never really willing to trust Him with my life or my heart.

Hey, 27? You came crashing into those walls and obliterated them. [Hallelujah]

This time last year I was convinced you would be the one to bring me love. I wasn't necessarily wrong. I was simply misguided in what that should look like.

Want to know something, 27?

You are, bar none, the best year that has ever happened to me.

You took my basic fairytale dream, seesawed through it, and gave me a glimpse of the canvas being painted with my name on it.

Thank you for breaking me. For making room for Him.  For putting me in my place. For not giving me what I wanted, but bringing me to a land and a people I needed.

Thank you for always knowing when to be entirely too rough with me and when to sit back and chuckle as you whisper, "take a deep breath, you wild, wandering girl; get ready for your life to actually begin."