Growing Pains

Dear God,

This must be what it feels like to grow up, huh. You spend your weeks working nine to five days, get home, eat, sleep, and do it all again. On weekends, you spend one day in total relaxation—if you can call making lists of everything you need to do in the next week “total relaxation.” The other day, you go to church, get taught some moral lesson that you’d forgotten (again), and spend the rest of the day forgetting about it.

Then you start over.

It’s right about now that you realize that life’s probably never going to be as cracked up as the movies make it seem, unless it’s the ones that you call “bad” because it’s just too close to reality for comfort—that there’s probably not going to be a fairy-tale love story waiting in the wings of your future—that maybe there’s a lot of your dreams that will never be fulfilled, or worse, that your dreams weren’t really what you wanted.

And it’s right about now that you start to feel utterly lost. It’s terrifying, growing up. It’s all you ever wanted when you were younger, but now that it’s approaching, you’re turning tail and trying to run in the other direction. Some actually manage to flee—they’re the ones you look at and wonder, “when are they ever going to grow up?” They won’t. That’s the point. Others pretend to have a handle on the situation, when really, they’re hiding the same childlike fear you are

There aren’t a lot of choices in this situation. Either you run, or you face it—either way, you pray to God that He has a plan, because you sure don’t.

It’s so tremendously overwhelming, growing up. All of the sudden you’re worrying about everything. Everything. And sometimes you go to your mom’s house and you’re sitting in your bedroom thinking about the idea of growing up, and the thought is so big and so frightening that there’s a lump in your throat and you feel like you’re about to cry and you haven’t the slightest reason for it.

Well, it’s because you’re afraid.

Because I am afraid.

Love.