Anyone who knew me in high school or even in college knows that night games of any kind used to be one of my life's passions. I particularly loved "Dark," a cops and robbers hide and seek game played - you guessed it - after dark. So much of my childhood and early adulthood was spent with that game. I even have Dark to thank for the huge scar on my ankle and my inability to properly flex my foot and toes.
Tonight I attended a day-late Halloween costume party that some of us put together for our "young adult" ministry at my church. We played Sardines. Tragically, I was the girl that my five-year-ago self could not stand. The one who refused to get "into it." I played, yes. But mostly I just wandered around and pretended to be trying.
I mean, part of my lack of excitement was probably the fact that I unexpectedly got called in to work overtime today and was thus sleep deprived and semi-stressed from a day at work and the knowledge that tomorrow I go back to start my "real" work week. Part of it was the fact that I didn't know most of the people there. But mostly? I've just grown up. My life has moved on and I found myself stuck in between worlds tonight.
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Sometimes I think about what my life was like here only a year or so ago. I was surrounded by people I considered family. We were tight knit and spent at least three or four nights a week together. Sometimes more. Some of them were close friends, some were merely people with whom I loved spending time. My life was far from perfect; I think of my first year in Saint Marys as one of the more emotionally turbulent of my life. But I can say for certain that I was surrounded by amazing people.
That hasn't changed. I have amazing friends here.
But tonight the absence of so many who once formed the core of my world here was hard to deal with. Some are out to sea, others have moved away, still others have simply drifted away from what once was. Tonight there were only a handful of us from the group of people I once thought indestructible. I was reminded tonight that life always moves on, and that I must be willing to move with it.
And sometimes I can't move with it. I'm getting old. I realized that as I attempted to fit in with people younger than my youngest sister. I realized that as I found myself just wanting to sit around the bonfire and talk about life and found no one else was interested in such a pursuit (so I sat there by myself and hummed songs into the smoldering fire). I realized that as I stood lamely by as everyone else crammed into the closet in a rousing game of Sardines.
I've slowed down. Adulthood has arrived.
I was the oldest there tonight by several years. I felt so keenly the absence of those my age, those who have, maybe for the same reasons as I didn't fit tonight, drifted away. I realized something else equally strongly, though.
No matter how difficult, no matter how much I don't handle large groups well, no matter how large the age gap, God has called me to be present here and now. Here is beautiful, even as it is different. Now is a new reality in which I am older than the rest. Here is the opportunity to love these people, to make this new core the old guard. This group of people, however much changed, is the reason my life is beautiful in this terrible town. These people have been and still are Jesus to me in a world that can so quickly feel so very lonely.
I will fight for them, for us, for this community that is so fragile and so easily lost.
It's worth it.
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