I will be nineteen years old tomorrow.
This past year has probably been the most intense year of my life... Me and myself at eighteen have been through a lot together - both brokenness and beauty. Such beauty...
Maybe it sounds strange...but in a sense it seems like there is you and then there is you where you are. There will always be something of us changing, something we grow out of, step out of, leave behind... And then there's what endures. But even in its enduring it is shaped by where it has been, what it has come through, what it has given up. And together everything is shaping us into becoming. Becoming something, someone. Please God it is who we are meant to be.
My theology professor this past semester gave me much to think on. He is an amazing man, and our course together was certainly a God-experience. One of the most powerful things he has left me with is this thought:
Every single human life has an inestimable value. If you squander that value, you leave a hole in existence - a wound, a gap, that cannot be filled.
God only planned one you. One me. There won't be someone else coming along in five or ten or a couple hundred years to do my work if I leave the job undone, to live my life again if I don’t live it to the fullest. I hold in my two hands the full destiny of a human life: to fulfill, or to squander. A hole in the history of the world has been fashioned exactly to my shape, made ready for this great work that God has put me here to discover and to live out. Me. Not you, not anybody else. I'm the only one who can live what He has made me for—and live it all the way.
What has He made us for…
We think we know. We think we have living all figured out.
But what did He mean when He said put out into the deep? What would happen, I wonder, if we actually realized that the old rumor is true: Everything means something. Everything we see is an analogy of something even more beautiful. There is so much more to life than the crest of the wave. With every new dawn, the call reechoes over the heart of the world…
Put out into the deep.
Do we hear it?
Have we ever been to the deep?
Would we know it if we tripped over it?
Do we recognize its face behind the veil of the ordinary?
Are we really living the real? Wouldn’t it be scary to find out, in end, our reality was only the tail end of the really real that we were made for?
What would happen if somebody told us that life—every single little mundane minute of life—is wrought with meaning beyond our wildest dreams?
For what it’s worth, I’m telling you now.
We can blink, or smile, or laugh, or wrap it up nice somewhere for later when maybe we’ll have more time and feel like thinking about it… But it’s true.

The close of an eighteenth year…so much learned, and so much left to stumble over, crumble under, fall into, climb to the top of.
Who am I? Who was I? Who will I be at this time next year?
And come the end…what will I leave behind me? A hole, half-filled…or maybe two-thirds of the way filled? three-quarters?
Or an echo of something greater? A higher reality. A deeper magic—that cracks stone tables, and writes epics with ordinary lives, gives you a new name, casts out fear, and laughs in the face of an end to what was meant for forever…