one word 365.

I’ve been hesitant to write anything about the transition from 2011 to 2012.

In case you’ve forgotten, let me remind you that my life dramatically changed last year. I got married, moved across the country, started grad school…my whole life altered and I was left to try to make sense of it all.

It has been difficult, as I’ve somewhat chronicled through this little blog of mine. In some ways I’ve allowed myself to feel that difficulty, but in other ways I think I felt like it was easier to shut down parts of myself and gloss over everything that happened in order to be able to survive the shock to my system. I’ve felt muted and perhaps unable to fully be the person who I know I am, the person who I was when I wrote this blog at the end of the World Race.

These days, however, I feel myself waking back up. I feel stronger, more alive and ready to process what it means that I’m married, a California resident, and earning my Master’s degree. I have a feeling that this is going to be a journey of delving deep into my true thoughts about what has happened and allowing the Lord to speak to me concerning these matters.

The word that I’ve chosen to declare over 2012 is identity.

I never realized how much of my identity I put into the fact that I was single until I wasn’t single anymore. Before we got married, I found myself grieving my independence, freaking out over the huge life change I was approaching, and thinking how weird it was that soon I would become part of a we.

I’m still trying to figure out what it fully means that I’m married now. Sometimes I feel like I’m in the twilight zone. It feels like Ohio me still exists, where everyone there knows me as single, and they’re the ones who really truly know me. And yet the reality that I live in is that I’m in California and pretty much everyone I know here only knows me as married, Colby’s wife. And that’s what I am, absolutely, and I’m so happy and blessed to be that, but I feel like people don’t know me fully. I feel like there’s a great line dividing who I was then and who I am now.

Maybe it’s because I don’t fully know myself as who I am now. I knew myself as a single person. This new identity as one half of a whole still feels fresh. It still feels like the bigger coat that I don’t quite fit but I’m trying my best to keep up with.

I Corinthians 7:17 says,  “And don’t be wishing you were someplace else or with someone else. Where you are right now is God’s place for you. Live and obey and love and believe right there. God, not your marital status, defines your life.”

Over this year my prayer will be that I can take that verse to heart. Yes, my life has changed, how others see me has changed, but what hasn’t changed is my identity that is firmly rooted in the fact that I am God’s child. My job to live and obey and love and believe hasn’t changed one bit. I pray that He continues to reveal what that looks like in this new season of life.