I’ve always admired surfers. There’s something about watching someone find their balance just long enough to stand up and ride a wave. It’s kind of amazing and preposterous at the same time. For most of my life, I watched from a distance, low key jealous of how much fun they were having in a place I avoided. It wasn’t until a few years ago when I learned how to swim that I finally started to understand what I’d been missing.

Lately, life has felt a lot like surfing.

Except if I’m being honest, I haven’t been riding the waves, I’ve been fighting them.. Waves of ups and downs in relationships, parenting, and work. The thing about fighting a wave, is that you never win. Eventually you either learn to go with the flow and “catch the wave”, or it takes you under as you struggle to swim against it. For those of us who like love control, well, it’s even more difficult because we can’t even fathom going with the flow.

Last night our small group was discussing this very topic. We’re reading the book, Give Me A Word by Christine Valters Paintner and we’ve each been on a journey of identifying the word or phrase that speaks to us in this season of our lives. Last night one person offered up her phrase that came to her in a moment of clarity. The phrase was, ride the waves. She too is in a season of what at times can feel like overwhelming busyness, the highs and lows of unexpected opportunities and losses.

Just when it feels like you’ve got your bearing, crash, here comes another wave.

We could all relate, especially me as this perfectly describes what I’ve been feeling a lot lately. I’d just written in my journal that morning:

In some ways I feel so close to the realization of everything I’m dreaming of… 

On the other hand, days like yesterday makes it feel so far away.  

And now I’m tired. 

But then, just a few hours later I got a call that would change my life (more on that in a later post!). Now the tide was beginning to turn. If you’d asked me only hours earlier how I felt about my prospects, I would have probably sounded unsure, maybe even a little discouraged.

It’s amazing how things seemingly change so quickly. But the truth is, everything happens gradually, then suddenly right? The story reads well in hindsight. We’d been working towards this moment for the past year, and now it was beginning to pay off. The thing is, we never knew how or when the tide would turn. It was the waiting game that was most difficult.

I didn’t really know how to take the news if I’m being honest.  

I wanted to jump and shout for joy, but I was also concerned about where this next wave of experience and emotion would take me. I have this even keel personality that doesn’t allow me to get too high or too low.  It’s a self-protective mechanism that I learned from a childhood where I experienced the disappointments of extreme highs and lows, so I guess I wanted to protect adult me from that roller coaster ride.

But I’m done going through life clutching the surf board.  That’s no fun! I want to learn to ride the waves and actually enjoy the process, including the ups and downs.  So that’s where I am today, knowing full and well that eventually I’ll fall and crash. A strong wave will take me under at some point, that’s just what waves do, that’s the rhythm of life. And when that happens, I’ll have friends and family and a community there to support me.

But for now, we’re riding this high for as long as it lasts. And I can’t wait to pull someone else up onto the board to ride with me while our village cheers us on.

SDW3