Turning 43
We had everyone over for Acai bowls. You can buy Acai in the USA now. It was only $100 for 3 gallons. 3 gallons was too much. But now I get Acai for dessert every day for the next couple of months.
Every year around my birthday, I write a letter to my future self (in five years). Five years is long enough to not know what it will be like, but close enough to specifically have ideas of what you would like it to be. This yearly exercise always makes me cry somewhere in the process: in the process of opening and reading a letter I wrote to myself five years ago (and now that I’ve done this for years…I can open letters from 10 years ago and 15 years ago, and soon, 20), and the process of figuring out what I want to say to myself in five years (2030). Just think: I’ll be 48, Sofia will be in High school and Jessica in Middle school. I wonder if we as a country politically will have moved on, or will we just turn to a Democrat Donald over-reaction instead?
The tears came as soon as I opened my letter from five years ago. It was on a different size of paper—from my Brazilian notebook. The last birthday letter to myself written in Brazil. It was the first letter to say the word “Crap,” because well, the pandemic did call for that word to be used. At 38, I was moving towards my 40s, which seem to be full of finding out how you’ve run out of caring about many little things you used to worry about, like not saying “Crap.” As I read through all of the things I wished would be true for myself in 5 years: the grateful tears poured out. Perhaps not in exact wording, but in spirit, everything I wished for my 43 years old self has come true: my family transitioned to the USA well. I am still connected and growing with World Renewal Brazil, and get to visit regularly. My family is growing and thriving, our home is beautiful, and I feel fulfilled and appreciated.
I went and opened the letter from 10 years ago, written when I was 33. It was all about having babies, my cozy apartment, and holding close to the USA people (who were far at the time) and the Brazil people (who were close) in all the transitions back and forth. Then 15 years. At 28 I wrote of a boy I’d met (Caid), but wouldn’t even write his name because I wasn’t sure if it would be anything I’d want to read in 5 years. I cried again, reading about my daily lovely life in Brazil, and my dream for “10 Living Stones programs in 10 years.” Did you know that came true this year? Sure, it took longer than 10 years, but they are starting the 10th Living Stones program at ABBA camp. Just last week I found out that Pastor Assuerio, who started Living Stones in 1998, is now going to be starting a Living Stones program in Mozambique. Living Stones is going international.
Reading these letters makes me feel like I can hold time in my hands for just a minute. It reminds me that I haven’t really changed that much: most all the things I want look different in specificity, but are the same at heart. I feel grateful and overwhelmed at all of the different beautiful lives (or phases of life I guess) I’ve gotten to live. I feel the heavy nostalgia and Saudade of what was and yet I cannot return to. Often around my birthday, I read something that says it better than I can. This year it was from Sarah Bessey (https://sarahbessey.substack.com/p/constellations).
She goes over her nighttime routine with her daughter and then, “These conversations never become “content;” they will never teach anyone else a lesson, never illustrate a point, never leave the sanctuary of our home. This is the real sacred work. I’m such a tiny brick in the diverse and enduring wall of goodness protecting something precious in us all, but I’m doing my part here.
There comes a day when you realize you’ve always been replaceable. Well, replaceable everywhere but the place where you belong. I thought I needed to write blog posts five to six times a week, books every year, answer questions for others that could only answered by their own living (if at all), clapback at bad faith actors in public, opine on it all. I thought the needs of others constituted a calling. The funny thing is that I wasn’t even that ambitious or competitive by nature, I just felt an urgency or demand about it because some part of me really thought we were changing the whole wide world.
And it was fun and meaningful, don't get me wrong. I was grateful and alive and I felt like I was part of a beautiful movement or two within a community alongside friends, too. I was more hopeful then. A couple years ago in an interview, the host of The Late Show and unexpected philosopher Stephen Colbert spoke poignantly about “learning to love the thing you most wish hadn’t happened.”3
I don’t believe for one second that God is behind our suffering for a greater purpose or ordained it for whatever we mistake as glory, but I do believe God can bring beauty out of the coldest ashes long after your prayers went unanswered. Maybe that’s grace, maybe not. I can’t figure it out, so I give God glory for it. I’m also left with the work I actually loved to do most - to just write about all the ways we experience and know the love of God in our ordinary lives right from the center of a blessedly ordinary life. I’m with the people who actually do consider me irreplaceable. There is zero part of me that gets to believe my own hype anymore, what a blessing. I was never as necessary as I imagined I was.
It turned out that my dad was right, too: I was, in the end, entirely replaceable. Thank God. There were dozens, hundreds, of smarter and better qualified people who are much better at the social media hot takes than I ever was, what a relief. I mentioned that I am less hopeful about changing the world now. I am, however, more hopeful about actually loving the world. And, even when I’m not hopeful at all, I am committed to the tending to this world as if everything, every one is a universe worthy of love.
Turns out, I was replaceable everywhere but here. Here in this little girl’s bedroom, my hands resting on her head while I pray her to sleep because somehow, like her older siblings, the steady present faith that I hold as a precious gift now is the ground she walks on and it is the reality of her days. Her bedroom door stays cracked open to hallway lights and so her particular kitten will enter into her rest after I leave. This is where the constellations shine out in the darkness.”