Exactly fifteen years ago, in the spring of 1998, I threw myself a luau themed graduation party. I was sixteen and already accepted for a Discipleship Training School course in Maui, Hawaii. The centerpieces were glass fishbowls inhabited by three goldfish each; fish bought for the express purpose of being centerpieces and being sent home with the children of hapless attendees. Each fishbowl featured a place card listing the names I had given to the fish in the respective bowl. (i still love naming things.) It was clearly going to be a rager.
I wore a full length pink dress I bought for a few dollars at a garage sale. I had never had any school dances or proms but had always desperately wanted to wear a formal gown. This wasn't exactly a formal gown ( it was home made and secondhand) and even so, I was critically overdressed for a party in the east wing fellowship hall of our church- but it was full length and kinda satiny...and that was something.
Below is a photo of my precious and supportive family at the time. This photo reminds me how much fifteen years can change. Half of the people in the photo with me are no longer alive; i live nearly four thousand miles from those remaining. Of those, I used to see their faces on a near daily basis; i now see them annually, at best. I am grown up, far away, and across an ocean. They are still loving and supportive- even with the distance between us. A blessing if ever I have known one. But fifteen years can really reshape a family landscape.
Fifteen years ago, I was sixteen and still only dreaming of the place I now call home. I could not have imagined where the next decade and a half would take me, nor the doors the Lord would open before me. So much lay out in the unknown. Its crazy to me now on the other side of all those years.
Its been a wild journey from those sunny goldfish bowls to this quiet rainy night on my couch in Maui; its wild looking back fifteen years from this month.
