How Can This Be?

How can this be? How can the year 2011 be coming to a close? How can I be a month from seventeen when I have had no time to enjoy being sixteen?
This year has coasted past me in a flurry of difficulty, joys, trials and errors, choices and growing up.
So much has happened this past year.....almost too much to describe.

The difficulties, being diagnosed with multiple scoliosis.....a painful hindrance to much I want to do.
The joys, my salvation which changed my life and where it is heading in a complete 180*
The trials and errors, battling with my sinful nature, and allowing it to win on occasion, the job searching and failing.
The choices, trying to decide if college or an Institute for the Arts is a better choice, do I contemplate moving out or staying at home? Do I try and go for that scholarship or get a student loan?
And the growing up, oh, I have done so much growing up it seems!! And I know I have so much more to do, I am yet a young woman, yet to reach her full maturity in womanhood.

So many events of the past year have moved me, changed me, hurt me and made me happy. I spoke of growing up in the form of driving a few months ago.........my license arrived in the mail three days ago.

For as long as I can remember, I looked forward to school. I loved learning.
But this year has been so difficult for me school-wise. I have never felt so much despair over something, that gnawing sensation of failure.
Does this make me prideful and arrogant, the anger I feel at failing? Maybe it does, maybe I am prideful and arrogant.......maybe I am being taught a lesson....
Lord willing this is my last full year of high school, Lord willing I graduate next year after a semester of 12th grade. Then I can focus on pursuing a job, saving up some money to help with college.

Strangely enough [or maybe not so strange] the words by Lewis from Till We Have Faces, come to my mind.

I have always...had a longing for death...it was happy days I longed the most...when we were up there on the hills...with the wind and sunshine.....and because it was so beautiful it set me longing, always longing


Yes! because death means eternity with Christ! Forever in perfection singing praises to my Savior.....
How glorious that day will be, when Jesus descends from the heavens and that trumpet sounds.
"......and every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess....."


Oh yes, I will be kneeling, and I will be confessing....I am kneeling and I am confessing, I am confessing everyday for the sins of my thoughts or deeds.
How amazing and glorious it is to know your heart has been wiped clean, your soul washed in the blood of Christ.....What a beautiful day it will be.....

In last weeks message my Pastor mentioned something.....how new believers have moments where they ask, "Lord, what wilt thou have me do, Lord What Shall I Do?"
And I smiled.

It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from.