Born In The Summer Of My 27th Year

About four years about I started a birthday tradition. That tradition is to find a song with my new age in it, which would therefore become my song for the next year. Since the songs didn’t have to be realistic, or applicable to my life, the only real requirement was that somewhere in the song the lyrics would include the number of my new age. It didn’t even have to be in reference to age. So for example my 23rd year was, unfortunately, Blink 182’s What’s My Age Again, ridiculous I know (it was my first round so I was, at that time, easy contented). The next year Switchfoot stole my headphones, and heart, with the beautiful 24, perfectly packed with plenty of 24s. A year later, and a quarter of the way to a century, Denison Witmer’s solemnly beautiful 24 turned 25 sang me through the year. A momentary sense of concern swept over me the day I turned 26 as darkness began to close in, not over my life, just over the dwindling hours of birthday left in my day. It neared ten o’clock and I didn’t have a 26 song. But the hours of waiting were worthwhile and, thanks to a couple dear friends of mine, I got one of the best birthday gifts ever; a song for my birthday. A song for me turning 26. A song made, and written, specifically so that I would have a song for that year :) It still blows my mind and warms my heart each time I listen to it.

Last Wednesday another birthday found me, and I welcomed the lovely number 27 into my daily life. Again I wondered, “What song will it be this year?” A special friend and mentor in my life, Dee Dee Lund, without even knowing about my little tradition, brought me the answer. John Denver’s Rocky Mountain High. Sounds funny, I know. I have to admit I don’t know I have ever listened to an entire John Denver song, or maybe I have, I just didn’t know it was him at the time. But yesterday, on a quiet Saturday night I sat down at the table in my room, next to an open window, plugged in my headphones and let John share that piece of his heart with me. The first line flew through my ears and landed on my lips as a smiled spread, “Born in the summer of his 27th year.” Me too! Then came the lines, “Comin’ home to a place he’d never been before/ He left yesterday behind him, you might say he was born again/ You might say he found a key for every door...” Those doggone lyrics got me a thinkin about the current staytus of my life...

Even though I may be in Hawaii with the ocean, instead of Colorado with the mountains I couldn’t help but identify with this song. I have committed to being here for the next two years which means that with each meal, conversation and walk along the ocean Kona gradually becomes more home to me. I have entered a new stage of my life, or as they say in YWAM, “a new season.” Each day I take one more step away out of yesterday and into today. Each day my world is being shaken and new revelations God, his magnitude and overwhelming greatness, begin to emerge. I can hardly fathom or process it all. I told my sister today that God is shaking and breaking me, all for the better of course... I hope each day a little bit of the girl that got off that plane from Minnesota over a month and a half ago falls away, and a bit more of the lady God longs to see take her place begins to break out. It won’t be easy, I realize. Surrender never is. But He is bringing me further from the point where I care what it looks like, and closer to the place that makes it all the more worth embracing. Something big is on the horizon. I feel it and see flashes of it each week. Aslan is on the move :) and I want to be a part of it, whatever that means.

As I head into this next week I understand what he means when Denver says, "You could say he was born again. I can't help but have this sense that new pieces of me are being brought to life. I don' t know what they are just yet, but I feel them coming. And while I may not have the “key for every door," but I feel pretty confident in the Key I do have, the door it opens and the One who holds it.

Thanks for joining me in my Rocky Mountain ramblings. Enjoy this second week of August and I hope atleast one of the days involves a popsicle or s’mores, or a popsicle s’more (if you try that please send pictures my way)