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Thirty-five.

So now I’m 35 years old. Did I really just type that? 35. It’s a nice looking number in print, I think the 3 and the 5 balance each other nicely. But it sounds so much older than 34. Seniors in high school are half my age now. And I’m old enough to run for President. It sounds a little bit … old to me. Not old like in a bad way old. But I guess I should say it sounds like there’s no mistaking I’m an adult now. It’s been awhile since the world’s seen 1977.

But I woke up this morning not feeling like 35 years of my life are gone. I woke up feeling like I have SO MUCH MORE ahead of me. I have evolved and in a sense “grown up” in a lot of ways over the past year. My life now at 35 is completely different than it was the day I turned 34, thanks to the grace of God and the grace of my amazing Michelle. I feel like it’s taken me this long to figure out the truly important things in life, and to actually start pursuing them. I love my wife more now than I ever have, and I look forward to seeing that love get even better. I look forward to watching Sebo get bigger and turn into the little man he is already becoming. I want to reflect the love that God has for me on everybody I meet. I want to be a grace-giver. I want to read and write and draw and travel. I’ve had a healthy fascination with photography since I was in college, and I enjoy seeing what I can do with it. Michelle and I have so many exciting projects that nobody else knows about that we can’t wait to unleash on the world. Money has never been much of a motivator for me but I would like to make enough to protect my family a little better than I have. I want to be more active and learn to fight bad guys like Jason Bourne.

Basically I kind of always feared that turning an age like this would mean that maybe my best years were behind me. And that’s just not the case. I feel like so much of my life has been awkward. Learning how to drive, how to have a job, how to treat people, how to live, how to love … and I’m still learning so much every day. But now that I am of a “respectable” adult age, I feel like my learning has just begun, and that excites me. I never want to stop learning. Among other things, I recently read A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller and it really woke me up and has started making me pay attention to what I’m doing with my life. I think that’s part of why I have so much hope today, because if I am a character in my own story, then I get to (at least in part) decide where the story leads and what I’m going to tell the world with my life. And I don’t feel like this story is nearing an end, I feel like it’s more near the beginning of the middle, where I’ve finished the popcorn, put down my drink, and I’m squeezing Michelle tight because while it’s been good so far, I can tell it’s about to get really good.

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