2010, In Review

When I look back on this past year in the future, I am not sure what will stand out to me the most. It has been, without a doubt, the most incredible year of my life so far. If I think back for a moment to how circumstantially different my life was a year ago today I am overwhelmed.

Here is a brief timeline: When the year began I was still a full-time employee at Ferguson Enterprises in El Paso, Texas. On the fourth of January I gave my two weeks notice. In mid-January I started taking undergraduate literature courses from UTEP. I went to New York City to visit my friend Casey and we talked for hours and hours about the future (of which I had at the time no idea). In February we went to Chadron, Nebraska to watch my brother, Tyler, complete his odyssey as a DII basketball player. The first weekend of March Clara and I ran a 50 mile race in the mountains of Southern Arizona, though somehow I ended up running 52 miles. I learned very many things about my wife that day, namely how little I deserve her. That same March, the Kansas State men’s basketball team went to the Elite Eight. (This has little to do with me, but made for quite the March.) In May we ran a 50k race in Colorado. In May we also decided to move to Kansas over the summer. In early July I moved all of our stuff to a storage unit in Manhattan, Kansas and flew back to El Paso for a painful goodbye with many dear friends. The next day Clara and I drove up to Colorado to begin our own odyssey: the 500 mile coterminous Colorado Trail. Upon finishing we spent a few days in Colorado before moving to where our stuff was in Manhattan. Unable to sell our house in El Paso we moved into an upstairs apartment in our pastor’s house, complete with sloped floor, no air-conditioning/poor heating, and no electric in the bathroom (though we can’t beat the price: free). I started my graduate studies at K-State, Clara got a job in a very interesting home health care situation, and we planted ourselves in the church here. In November we found out we are expecting our first child. This was one of the more shocking moments of my life and gave us one of the biggest pleasures any child can have (especially this one): telling your parents they are going to be grandparents. December gave us a return trip to El Paso for the wedding of two dear friends and the Faithwalkers conference, where I am now.

It looks odd to condense a year in such a way. As I look back on the list I am at turns impressed with myself, and then I consider the way I limped through those races, the way we almost quit fifty miles from the finish of the Colorado Trail, the many times I have failed in the past few months to make the move to Kansas “worth it.” In many ways it was just another year of fighting my flesh, trying to let the Spirit in me have more sway, trying to learn how to give God glory from the paltry sacrifices I seem willing to offer. Sometimes I won, sometimes I lost. This life, for all of its beauty, grace, and depth of experience, is, for the most part, a battle. Or, perhaps more accurately, a struggle. A struggle to become the person you want to be, and then realizing that is insufficient. A struggle to kill sin, fight laziness and apathy, to resist the inertia this world promotes and be a worker, to be diligent and disciplined when bombarded with tools for being sedentary and idle. As amazing experientially as the year has been I have started to learn that this life is not merely about collecting experiences. You can travel, run long distances, hike longer distances, move all over the country, read all of the great books and still miss out on the most important parts of this life. And, to me, the most important parts are honoring God and bringing him glory, loving other people as I have been loved, and becoming more fully human, which practically speaking means becoming more like Jesus was when he lived as a human. In that sense, then, 2010 was a success. As every year is where you survive the battle and maintain the focus on those proper ends.

Also, I cannot wait to be a father.