If I can just pen the first line, I’ll find my way in. That’s the way it always goes – in writing, but also in life. Funny how if you just let yourself begin, take the first step, the next few footholds rise to meet you. Life has a way of sweeping you away. Sometimes you’re lost at sea and others you’re anchored in a safe harbor, but you’re never in control. You long to stay a while, hold on to this moment, but life tears you away again. Time never standing still.

It’s my twenty-seventh birthday, and I’m trying to process this leap from mid-twenties to late-twenties. For it is a change, maybe not like 29 to 30 or 49 to 50, but a change nevertheless, one that requires a subtle shift in perspective. For the kid who longed to remain 12 forever, growing older carries an emotional weight akin to watching my stuffed animal collection be bargained off at Mom’s yard sale. Begrudging acceptance. 

In adolescence, I would write letters to myself to be opened on future birthdays. Don’t get excited, there’s nothing written for 27, but from time to time I look back on those letters and smile at the childish voice that wanted so much to be brave, to be right. And in a lot of ways I was right. In the beliefs that count the most I haven’t changed. I still long to live a meaningful life, to honor the One who created me, to change and heal other people through my words, written or spoken.

But I’d be lying to insist that my voice hasn’t changed. Time has changed me and brought a sobriety that wasn’t there when I first penned a few lettres-a-moi. I had no idea how grief, approaching as assuredly as a storm in summer, would utterly shape me.

And yet, I simultaneously couldn’t have imagined the joys I would find in adulthood. I had wildly inaccurate views of marriage, but despite that, the reality of marriage – being deeply and irrevocably understood by another human being – is indescribable. I had no idea what real friendship was. Real independence (cue Kelly Clarkson). 

Age inevitably comes with regret. To err is human; to hurt others is par for the course. There are times in life when apologies are too little and too late, and at twenty-seven, I already feel that. Choices I can’t undo. People that I loved and damaged with words still hanging somewhere in the air, irretrievable. 

I wish I could sit down with that 12-year-old Lizzy, the one brimming with advice and excitement for the future, and could describe to her the paths to take, the ones to avoid. But I can’t do that anymore than I can see the future. 

Live and learn – simultaneously my life’s motto and my greatest curse.

I’m left trying to reconcile the person who existed back then and the person who exists today. I remember someone telling me in college –“Thank God for letting such awful things happen so something beautiful can come.” And while I haven’t fully wrapped my head around what that means, I get maybe an infinitesimal fraction of it. 

Joy would not be joy outside the context of sorrow. 

In this world, there will always be someone who is hurting more than me. There will always be someone who has lost more, been through more, suffered more. There’s someone out there who has a whole truckload of sadness. And while that doesn’t lessen my backpack of sorrow, it does shove it into perspective.

The more I focus on other people, the less magnified my pain becomes. The less I focus on myself, the more I can let go of the past. Not saying that I’m practicing this well…I’m simply saying. Maybe one day I’ll believe it, perhaps on my seventy-seventh birthday (50 years of screw-ups still to come!).

If there’s one consistent theme in my letters to a future self, it’s the recognition of limited understanding. Some part of me always suspected that my mother knew more than I did…(I can hear you giggling). As a child, I didn’t recognize my mom’s ability to perceive, to meet a person and understand nearly instantly who they are and what they are capable of. She’s had more than her fair share of grief, but the experiences have also given her an unmatched perspective, one that I’m still growing into. 

At fourteen, it infuriated me that I wasn’t as beautiful as my sisters, as smart as the tall boy at math field day, as wise as my piano teacher. Even then, I understood that I was without answers, despite not knowing the questions life was going to ask.

So, a few simple things I’ve learned in my limited, happy, devastating, miraculous twenty-seven years: 

• Loving God and other people more than I love myself enables me to love myself better
• Seasons are survivable because they are exactly that – seasons
• I don’t have all the answers (my mom has more)
• I will understand more next year than I did this year
• Just because I can’t feel God in the moment, doesn’t mean He isn’t there
• The painting isn’t finished

A few weeks before I turned twenty-three, I wrote in my journal: 

I think there’s only one thing I am truly afraid of and it is Time. Everything else I can trust God for, but in the moment by moment, my actions feel so completely in my own hands. My greatest fear is for years to pass and me to look back and realize that I did nothing. Nothing worthwhile. Northing worth holding on to. I hate…despise…wasting time. But I can’t forget that I’m staring at a painting two centimeters from the surface. If I step back, I no longer see brush strokes and empty hours, but meaning. At least that’s what I hope to see. 

God make me useful. Make me needed. I want every second to be yours.