49 years

This week I turned 49 years old and began my 50th year of life. My birthday week started with dinner at a Brazilian steakhouse and ended with a gathering of friends and family in my backyard.

Over the week, I have been reflecting on the life I have lived thus far. Highs and lows. Victories and defeats. Good, bad, and ugly.

I could write a book on what I’ve learned, but let me share a few nuggets of what came to mind…

Some lessons are only learned from experience.

I have read more books than I care to count, listened to more sermons than I can remember, spent hundreds of hours in therapy, and journaled thousands of words. But until those words manifested in my life, they were just ideas and concepts.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I tend to get stuck in my head and overthink things. There are moments where I know all the right things to say and do, but they remain in my mind. They don’t become lessons learned until I act on them, sometimes finding success and other times failure.

This is not only important for self-reflection, but also as I deal with others. Often I get frustrated because someone doesn’t seem to “get it,” but I need to remember they may not have had an opportunity to learn from experience yet. I need to step back and provide the opportunity for them to find that success or failure for themselves. Simply preaching at someone or telling them what to do is usually the seed, not the sprout or plant. Experience is what life needs to grow to it’s full potential.

Sometimes life just sucks.

I have spent much of my life trying to control my environment to avoid pain and fear. While feeling better in the short-term, it typically results in stunted growth and emotional and spiritual immaturity. Unfortunately, I have too often learned that the hard way.

My experience of childhood sexual abuse (CLICK HERE to read my blog about that) caused me to develop coping skills for numbing pain and fear. While serving me well in my childhood, I carried those coping skills into adulthood and often avoided difficult situations, bypassing necessary steps in my growth.

Let’s be honest, there are times life is painful, agonizing, and unpleasant. Between the unhealthy extremes of numbing the pain and allowing the pain to overwhelm us, we must seek a healthy place of engagement with the difficult realities of life. It’s not a fun place to be and all of us work to avoid it to some extent or another. But when we can sit with the difficult emotions, we will find growth we may not have even realized was possible.

In order to live, we must learn to die.

Every day I am one day closer to death. Every moment this body grows a little older. Death is an inevitable exit ramp we all must take some day.

My last breath is not my first death, but my last. Every day before that, we must learn to die a little. Die to our pride. Die to our self-importance. Die to our mechanisms for avoiding vulnerability.

Dying to live may seem counterintuitive, but it is precisely the path to living. Deep inside we each contain a True Self, our essence, our core. It is who God made us to be. But life has piled pain, shame, abuse, neglect, rejection, self-righteousness, judgmentalism, and a host of other wounds and callouses over our True Self. It is only through the death of those layers that we can slowly discover that essence inherent in each of us.

The more I learn, the more I realize how little I know and how much there is yet to discover. However, this pathway is teaching me to think less of myself so I can think more of myself. By dying to myself a little more each day, I am learning my true value and self-worth, and discovering how I fit in the overarching narrative of God’s redemptive dream.