I don’t have a new year’s introspective look-back look-ahead kind of post inside me tonight.  Not for this year.  Not for the last year.  Maybe next year?  Who am I kidding?  I can’t emotionally afford to think about New Year’s Day 2018 right now.

I’m literally sitting at my kitchen table with zero plan of how this simple blog entry will even end in a few minutes, I certainly don’t have what it takes right now to envision an entire year looming in front of my face.

To my right, my vanilla tea is hot.  I’m thankful for that.  The fridge is a wasted storage space for nothingness because why didn’t anyone tell me Trader Joe’s closes on New Year’s Day?  The only crunchy food in this house is pita chips and I am eating them plain not because I like pita chips but because I like crunchy.  I’d like to say to someone, “Would you pop some popcorn for me?” but all the someones are asleep and Ryder isn’t too great at managing the knobs on the stove yet.

Also.  I’m mildly hyperventilating about jumping back into the routine of school tomorrow.  Or, more truthfully, about jumping back into the routine of planning school for tomorrow.  Which is what should be happening right now.

I have interview questions to write for an article and there’s this one chapter left in a book I want to finish and I think I’m receiving funny texts from Hannah and Amanda but I’m exercising impressive self-control to not respond currently.  That’s the new year, friends.  Cheers!

I’m not actually complaining.  My eyes are not at all blind to the good and the holy of my ordinary days.  I am, however, battling a tsunami of thoughts that want to send me into the shore face first.  I’ve got blog posts galore that I cannot bring myself to push “publish” on just yet because sometimes thoughts feel too raw and I have found that it’s wiser to sit on those blog posts for a few days or a couple of months.  Then, I find, almost always, that when I refine them and do push “publish”, God seems to use them in a far more lovely way than I would have had I sent them into the world premature and without thought.

It’s a tricky business, this self-revelation of mine.

I don’t know what the new year holds.  And, of course, even those of us who love making resolutions and plans don’t know what the new year holds.  I expect there’ll be some good and some hard and some mountain tops and some shore crashings.

For me, I’m thinking I’m going to need to work extra hard on a skill set that has never, not in forty-three years, not ever ever, been easy for me.  Living in the Right Now & Forever.

Not borrowing trouble from tomorrow (which has enough trouble of its own) and instead, staring straight ahead at what is before me and around me that is admirable and pure, true and noble, praiseworthy, lovely and right.

Like the fact that while I’ve been sitting at this table, slowly eating pita chips I don’t want, a boy who couldn’t sleep sat down beside me, read over my shoulder, laughed heartily at the thought of Ryder turning on the stove and then, with the grin of his that I love, happily announced, “I think I will pop some popcorn for you now.”

And so here I am, ending this blog post in a way I could never have guessed when I sat down.  I’m eating warm buttery salted popcorn that a person who loves me made just for me.

Oh my word, you guys.

I’m not exaggerating when I say this was just this side of an epiphany for me.

A very physical reminder.

God writes better stories than I do.

He just does.

Why, oh why, is that so hard to believe?

Well.  Let’s hope that 2017 can be just like this blog post.

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