Pondering A Decade

We are now entering new territory- pondering a decade. I’m not sure, how meaningful it is to anyone else but after listening to the Truth Project this week I know it’s important for me to look back…and learn. I was reminded, “Where we have come from, the past history is the key to who we are and where we are…and those who don’t know history have no sense of identity and no sense of wisdom as they explore where they are going to go. Without history we are lost both in terms of identity and in terms of wisdom of the way we go forward.”

So here I am a few days later in the Mexico City airport jotting down notes of where we have been in the last ten years. Our life begins to take shape on a brown paper bag from Starbucks. I really want to know who we have become in the decade. I want really want to see how we have been shaped so as to go forward in wisdom. Things that are going on the list are: big events, major books, circumstances that have shaped us, personal growth…

2000 started for us living in a single wide 500 sq. ft. trailer with three small children and a 50 gallon barrel of water in the bathroom waiting Y2K. It ended in Mexico with an 18 year old graduate and the other two close on his heels. The in-between seems like worlds apart.

Charting the big events is the easy part. We moved into a double wide, concluded twelve years of youth ministry to work in administration and resigned three years later, started home-schooling three, moved to Mexico for a four-year stint in missions.

Recognizing some key processes and circumstances isn’t so hard either. Beginning to pray like we had never prayed before, recognizing some certain shallowness and immaturity in our lives in ministry, experiencing life though another culture, thinking through an international third world grid, failing on different fronts…and growing through it, meeting friends from Colombia who introduced us afresh to the gospel.

The hard part is seeing clearly who we have become over the last decade. Harder still is to determine what it means for our future. We rest assured that God will weave it all together for good because we love Him and have been called according to His purpose.

What about you? What has shaped you over the last decade? Who have you become? How has your historical biography of the last ten years given you wisdom to move into the future?