New Beginnings, Slow Transitions, and a Long, Straight Pathway

If you look at my blog posts, you will notice that it has been over four years since my last post. In that four years, I ramped up my college classes, finishing my degree just after beginning my school year with my 9^th class of elementary students. It has been an intense, busy, but oddly enjoyable long haul, and at first I had worried about integrating back into “real life” without homework taking up every spare moment. (Honestly, that hasn’t been as big a deal as I expected.) 

It has been so long since I began college, taking classes online during the summers, and occasionally during the schoolyear as well, that now it’s done, I feel like I am standing at the threshold of a new beginning. All these years I have been holding my breath, as it were, waiting to finish preparing and find what it is that God wants me to do. Now that my schooling is done, it’s time to stop waiting and start doing all those things I have been saying I would do “when I’m done with school”. So, in the light of New Beginnings, I am going to be posting on my blogs again.

Slow Transitions: Not only am I on the threshold of new beginnings, I am also newly embarked upon my thirtieth year. One aspect of turning thirty has been an increased awareness that I will at some point have to set up a home of my own, and I have slowly begun the process of looking through the things I have accumulated, and seeing what I might still need and what I already have (and what I might have but not actually want). 

A result of this has been a new hobby, which has spurred me on to learn more about dishes, especially the lovely blue and white Spode dishes I have begun collecting. (Because, if I have to eventually live by myself, I can at least have pretty dishes to eat off of!) 😊

In light of this new hobby, I will be beginning a new blog, which will be primarily about Spode dishes, although I may from time to time feature other brands of vintage dishes. This new blog is essentially a way to vent my newfound knowledge and to cast a vision for the appreciation of old-fashioned things. Come and see! www.thewindinthewillowware.blogspot.com

 

Now, I’ve never been one to melt into a puddle of emotional goo over my age, and I’m not about to start now, but turning thirty has made me stop and evaluate where I’m at and what it is that God wants me to do with my thirty-year-old self. 

That’s where the Long, Straight, Pathway comes in. All this time I’ve been looking forward to finishing one phase of life so that I could do what I was “really meant to do”. However, if I take a moment to stop and look around me, I seem to already be doing exactly what I am “supposed” to do. My path doesn’t have to change because I reach a milestone, and I don’t have to follow society’s expectations of what I should be and do. In Christ, I am free to be content with His chosen pathway for me, even though it does at times seem to stretch out endless and unchanging far into the distance.

  

After all, what right have I to demand to know what’s miles further down the road if I refuse to walk the stretch right before my feet? So here I am at thirty: walking, trusting, finding comfort and peace in being exactly where God has chosen for me to be.