Deep

I've spent some time today browsing through the blogosphere, and as I read through several posts that paid homage to 2010 and voiced hopes for 2011, it suddenly struck me that tomorrow is the first day of a brand new year.

I always like the idea of a clean slate, a fresh start. I love the feel of the house when all the Christmas decorations are put away. I love the space, the bareness, the simplicity. I love returning to a sense of routine after the holiday chaos has subsided.

It's strange to think that this is how I felt about 2010 when it was just starting. Now, as we live out the last few hours of this year, it's hard to believe that at one time it, too, was a new year with a fresh start. Now it has run its course, its slate is full, covered in writing. Some paragraphs are lovely, some are hard to read, and some of the page is full of scribbles that I still haven't made sense of yet.

It feels too overwhelming to do an exhaustive recap of this past year. Something in me resists it. Perhaps I don't want to revisit certain things, perhaps it just feels like too much to revisit in one sitting.

I started back to school about a month ago and I'm enjoying it. I'm taking my advanced literary nonfiction workshops right now, which means I'm doing a lot of writing about...myself. The past few days I've been working on a manuscript that's due next week. It is the beginning of what I hope will be my thesis project, a personal biopsy of marriage, motherhood, and military life, with faith interjected throughout.

The process of writing has so much to teach. These past few days I've immersed myself back in my own memories in order to better tell the story I'm working on, and I've realized how much there is to those memories when I allow myself the time to examine them. Philip Gerard writes,

"in the act of revisiting our lives, we also gain something important: We recover memory. And in so doing, we come to understand our own lives better. In the end, that may be the best--if most selfish--reason for writing..."

Gerard says that "memory begets memory," and this is proving to be true. The more I remember, the more I remember. I've recently been planting myself back in the springtime of 2010, in the anxious weeks just before Chris departed for Afghanistan. I've also gone back, over six years ago, to the springtime of 2004, when Chris and I first met. The incredible thing for me about writing these stories out on paper is that I'm starting to see God in so many details I'd never made sense of before. It's made me wonder how many other places He's been in my past that I've failed to recognize.

The common thread between the spring of 2004 and 2010, other than the fact that they preceded summer deployments, is the Pacific Ocean. I've been thinking quite a lot about that big blue expanse of water, and how God took us there in the springtime in both of those years. It's just now that I'm starting to understand that perhaps that wasn't a coincidence. Perhaps He was trying to tell me something, something that was uniquely communicated through that particular place.

Chris and I were talking about it last night, the Pacific. I grew up on the Atlantic, so I'm always in awe of how different, how blue, the Pacific is. The unique thing about the Pacific ocean is that it gets very deep very fast. It's lovely to look at, it looks good from a distance, but the closer you get to it the more terrifying it is. I remember, over 6 years ago, when Chris and I sailed over it and swam in its depths. Within the first two hours on the sailboat I threw up. I had to drug myself with Dramamine to survive the first leg of the trip. At certain points of the journey, not even a tiny speck of land was visible, only water, deep deep water. But over time I started to enjoy the adventure of it, the choppy, rocking, loss-of-control freedom of it. I remember how frightening and exhilarating it was to plunge into its mysterious, unfathomable waters. Its depths are gauged in miles. Its water is purer, bluer, than any ocean I've seen.

Revisiting the vivid details of sailing on the Pacific, swimming in it, watching its waves crash on the shore, has made me realize how much God is like the ocean. Lately, listening to Him and following Him has felt like swimming in the Pacific. It's been terrifying, exhilarating, risky, deep, refreshing, all-encompassing.

2010 brought a lot of change for our family. It gave me a big dose of perspective, a hunger to live my life differently, a yearning to stop trying to do it all by myself. Had it not been for the hard things, I don't know that I'd be so ready to jump into His deep waters. But I am, and I know 2011 is probably going to be a wild ride...

How did 2010 impact you, and what are you hoping for in 2011?