time heals all things...

Today is my dear friend, Julia's birthday. The first time I met Julia we were at CollegeLife, which is training for people that potentially want to be YoungLife leaders. I met Julia because she was with my friend, Ellen, who was one of my best friends YoungLife girls. They had just come from a Georgia College Ambassadors meeting and Julia was wearing a blazer and pencil skirt and we joked about her being overdressed for CollegeLife, where the typical uniform is Nike shorts, a Patagonia pullover, and Chacos.

The thing about Julia is when you met her, you just knew there was something different about her, which now I can only point to as the Holy Spirit. She's one of those people you meet and it feels like a breath of fresh air. From the moment I met her all I could think about it how much high school girls were going to love her. I remember her freshman year she would come and talk to me about how scared she was to be a YoungLife leader and how she didn't know if she really wanted to apply for it. I would always tell her about how much I envisioned her being an amazing leader and how I thought she would be placed at Baldwin High School and girls there were going to love her because she was better at popping, locking, and dropping it than most of the school. And by the end of her freshman year she was doing just that. She was a leader at Baldwin and girls were falling in love with her because lets be honest, how could you not? And as for the popping, locking, and dropping, I'll just say there were quiet a few dance parties in our living room at their Wednesday night campaigners meetings once she moved in. 

At the end of her freshman year I asked her to move into our house. What an incredible blessing to get to live each day along side her for a year. I loved getting to watch her grow into this pillar of strength in our community. And I loved getting to watch her eagerly pursue high school girls. She was desperate to give her life away for the sake of high schoolers, and honestly anyone else who crossed her path, just so they could know Jesus. That is and always will be one of the most beautiful qualities about her. But if you have ever gotten to know Julia you know that she has many beautiful qualities. I think the most common description of her is joyful, but she is also passionate and loyal and zealous and my favorite thing is that she is consistent. She is consistent in all of these qualities and consistent in the way that she loves people. 

Some of you may remember a post I wrote about Julia a few months ago. Tragically, Julia passed last August. It was one of the most devastating things I, our house, and our community have ever experienced.  It was the most joyful sorrow I have ever felt. Joyful because I knew Julia was fully restored and healed in Heaven, walking hand-in-hand with Jesus. Sorrowful because the day of her accident she was headed back to Milledgeville and part of me fully expected her to walk in the downstairs door from the driveway at any moment, yelling as she came up the stairs, and we would all run across the house to meet her and then the other part of me knew that wasn't going to happen.

It has been just about nine and a half months and I still miss Julia everyday. There are still some days that are just as hard as the moment I got the phone call about her. I got the urge to watch her Celebration Service a couple nights ago and there were times while I was watching it that I could remember the heartache I was feeling that night so vividly.  

I have always heard time heals all things. What an incredible lie. Maybe this applies to things like paper cuts or petty arguments with your roommates about the dishes. But what about the real stuff, the things that are hard to heal? Time can numb your pain. Time can give you distance on your pain. Time can maybe even give you better hind-sight view on your pain. But one thing time can not do is heal pain.

Despite the days like today, that are harder to get through because I can't call Julia and hear about YoungLife and Phi Mu and Winshape and 221 N. Columbia, there are also days of great joy because of seeing signs of her throughout my day. Days that I remember that I learned from her how to better love people because of the way she earnestly cared for those around her. Days that I  have realized my deeper need for Jesus because of the difficulty of her not being here and there is rejoicing in that. Julia left behind a legacy of choosing joy regardless of circumstances. A legacy of celebrating life and the people in it because this is the legacy she found in Jesus. And a legacy found in Jesus is the only one worth leaving behind. I think Julia knew that more than anyone. These are days that I know there is peace in the midst of pain and that there is healing despite sadness. And I will never give the credit of this healing to time because time can not take ashes and turn them into life, only Jesus can. Jesus heals all things, not time. 

And once again, thank you to Julia for teaching me more about this. 

Happy Birthday, JJ! I love you.

gratitude.

Recently I have been noticing the difference between feeling grateful and having gratitude in my life.  I do realize that these by definition are entirely synonymous but to me there is something that feels slightly different about the two.  There are a lot of things I am grateful for in my life, having a job, a place to live, roommates that I have a lot of fun with, a car that runs (maybe not very well but hey, life's all about small victories, right?). I guess these are things that I notice everyday but I don't necessarily let myself feel my gratefulness for them. My gratitude. I think that is the difference for me. 

Gratitude evokes something much more in me. 

I love words. Maybe it is because I majored in "putting words together and speaking them out loud", also known as Rhetoric, but I LOVE words. Definitions, origins, antonyms, synonyms, I love it all. I decided to look up other words for the word grateful. I found things like thankful, gratified, indebted, and pleased. Then I looked up synonyms for gratitude. I found some of the same words but also a few more that I think coincide with my feelings towards the topic. They were words like acknowledgement, praise, grace, recognition, honor, responsiveness. 

Mmmmmmm....those are some good words, huh?? 

You are probably wondering what the picture at the top of this post has to do with any of this. I instagrammed this picture today. It is from this past weekend when two of my very best friends visited me from Georgia. I have known Jillian and Erica (not pictured) since my freshman year of high school, actually Erica and I met sometime in middle school....either way, I've been friends with them for what seems like forever. Forever in the best possible way.  I think there is something exceptional about the people that have known you for that long and still choose to fly across the country to visit you for less than 48 hours. There is something special about the ones that know where you come from, the places you have been to where you are now. And when I think of the fact that they still love me and cherish our friendship despite the ways I might have failed them in different areas and at different points in our friendship over the years leaves me with a deep, deep sense of gratitude. I didn't really fully grasp that gratitude until I was staring at this picture this morning and remembering the feeling I had in this moment. With our feet hanging off the edge of a mountain that we had just hiked, laying there with no worries except for how much time we had before the downpour of rain was coming, I felt completely known, completely comfortable, completely content. And those are things I can't say that I feel all the time with just anyone. Gratitude.

One of my favorite bloggers one time wrote, "Here's to gratitude and how it turns everything into enough." Cheers to that!