Forty

I turned forty last month. No fanfare, no party, no banners. Nope, just a quiet celebratory lunch with a close friend, coffee time later with another friend, weekend barbecue with the family. This year, in acknowledgement of the close of a decade and the beginning of another, my mother graciously agreed to crack open the family recipe box to make my favorite cake – apple with cream cheese frosting, saved for only the most appropriate of occasions.

You must understand – this cake is decadently dangerous with approximately 1000 calories per whiff, and that’s before you take a bite. I eat one sliver then leave the rest in Tucson with my family to decimate as they choose.   (Hey, in the epic Battle of the Scale in my family we play for keeps. In other words, I don’t “keep” the cake anywhere realistically in arm’s reach in my normal life.) It really is an enormous sacrifice for my mother to make this cake. It sits on the counter seducing you to destruction with its Siren’s song floating melodically throughout the house and across the patios. Honestly, the cake might be a teensy bit evil (Exorcism has not been ruled out. Just kidding.  Pretty sure God himself would eat this cake). But I digress…

So, back to turning forty. A Southern lady never admits her true age; so, I must like you all a lot, or I perhaps I have a point. Maybe both; please keep reading. I’ve heard said that lots of women have a hard time turning thirty. For me, thirty barely registered except as simply another birthday. I’d had my crying jag breakdown three years earlier at 27 when my divorce was final, and I’d left Washington, D.C. for good. Compared to 27, thirty was a breeze.

But then came my actual thirties, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating a bit when I say that those years really topped almost any horror I could have dreamed up on my own as a middle-class woman in America, and I’m pretty darn creative. So, as those years drew to a close, I thought I would eagerly anticipate the arrival of a new decade, a new era, a new beginning.   But as my birthday got closer and closer, the future of possibilities became obscured by the fog of past memories, and I began the slow climb up then a much more rapid slide down Mt. What –Could-Have-Been.   And somewhere in that slide I found myself clinging to a ledge by my unpainted fingernails, and occasionally I found myself tortured by the temptation to simply let go. Enough is enough sometimes. So, on my knees with tear-stained cheeks, on my fortieth birthday, I told Him I’d had enough, I was finished, and could no longer fight for Him, for me, or anyone else. And do you know what He did? He didn’t turn His face from me, didn’t give up. No, He simply continued to love me.

You see, this life I move through every day was not my life at all, at least not the life that I had carefully planned and plotted 20 years ago when I was oh, so young with my oh, so, young fiancé. In fact, nothing about my life now resembles anything close to what that life we planned together was going to be. Notice I said not my life, because the kicker is that he did get the life, our life– the money, the house, the job, even the 2 kids. He simply switched out the wife. (Soooo really didn’t see that one coming.  What can I say?  I’m naive.)

And what do I have to show for forty years? That was what really plunged the sword in deep then twisted it. You know my story. I won’t repeat it. But that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t running the tapes – you know, HD, crisp color all the good times when he loves me, and then all the bad times when I could not not even begin to fathom what had changed between us – in my head. Over and over again with the most pathetic part being, really, that I am not usually a bitter person, but on that day, that fortieth birthday, oh, wow, did I let the acerbic tinge of bitterness seep into the cracks most vulnerable. And, I felt it eating away at all things good and lovely and pure, which God allowed to happen to me and through me in the last decade.   My bitterness was destroying not just me but also God’s glory.

It’s so very easy to lose the focus of who we are and who we are meant to be, where we are meant to be going, when the fear of where we have been and why we aren’t still there takes over. And, for those interminably long few weeks, I was mired in that muck of self-doubt and suffered a huge derailment. Please read this carefully: just as God did not walk out on my marriage, he also did not mire me in the self-doubt or fears that threatened to pull me under sure as quicksand. God did not negate the vows I exchanged, the ones that I whispered through tears intending them to bind me forever. Nope, B did that in his very elegant, polished shoes.

As I crumbled to nothing, God stayed beside me, held me, stroked my hair, and cried with me. But sometimes it’s so darn hard to see that, feel that, and then cling to that 15 years later when you wonder where your life has gone. And when your self-pity has been spent, in His graciousness He allows you to see that your life is not over, not be a long shot.   It’s right under your nose and your feet if you care to look down.

So, maybe your path isn’t a yellow brick road straight into the Emerald City (Even Dorothy struggled with witches, flying monkeys, and self-doubt. Thus far, I’ve not encountered any flying monkeys). Maybe your path is a forked road in the woods on a snowy evening, and you must choose which road to continue on your journey. The only thing that matters is that which you know before you step onto your path, know down into your very marrow, that you are never alone. He is with you no matter your choice, even shall it prove to be the “wrong” path the first (or second, or third, or fourth…) time.

But if you wait for Him, in His love and mercy, He will show you step by step the Way. He will reveal the trail He would have you choose; maybe not all at once, maybe, terrifyingly, just one single step at a time. He promises that he will walk with us, show us. And, as always, his mercy leaves me quaking in awe: either way, whether I choose to await His guidance or I rush headlong into kicking doors open that should have remained dead bolted, even nailed permanently shut, He’s still with me (Trust me; I’ve kicked in a LOT of doors.). I’d like to think that by now, in any given situation I’d be wise enough to wait for the Light, wait for Him, wait for true direction. But then, you know me. All I can promise is that I shall try. I’ll let you know how that goes.