I love history. I have always loved history. I was one of those nerdy kids who read my social studies book cover to cover by about the second week of school.
What was and has been, has always fascinated me. I love to visit places where people have been reliving the human drama for a long time. I can feel the heaviness of so many souls. Such places give me goose bumps. I would have been a history major in college if it weren't for all the dates. I love history but not numbers and somehow the two are perpetually connected-- it is the timelines.
A good timeline will go a long way in making order out of a complex idea/world, but I struggle with all the numbers. I had an assignment at one point while pursuing my Masters that asked me to create a comprehensive timeline of the literature of my life. It was like one long mix tape of novels with a verbal annotation between songs. Needless to say it was a difficult but enlightening task as I re-walked my life path focusing only on the books I carried with me on the journey.
I remember a time when my own personal timeline was defined by positive life experiences. The Christmas we went skiing as a family, my first summer at Camp Glisson, the summer I went on a mission trip to New Mexico, the Interim I spent in Honduras, the semester I lived in Amsterdam, the youth BBQ when Kevin and I started dating, our wedding, and so on and so on. These sort of life moments served as the the vertical markers on my horizontal life that when labeled said, "something good and important happened here-- remember this."
In the past few days I have been thinking of my updated timeline and the definitions have seemed to shifted more to the negative, with a few notable exceptions. Now it looks more like: the summer my mother was diagnosed with cancer, the fall of Cavender's birth, the winter I finally had to drop out of my Masters program, the New Year's Day my father had a stroke, the summer I was diagnosed with postpartum depression, and so on and so on.
God is good. Life is good.
It has taken me awhile to see that each negative has brought something good into my life.
Besides it is my timeline-- it reflects what I am living. I am choosing to reflect the light and not the dark. I know there will be more times when I will stop and say, "something good and important happened here-- remember this."
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