Today is the first day of my blog.  I think that writing will be therapeutic for me.  It helps to center me, to ground me, and it gives me a chance to process my own thoughts.  Ultimately I am doing this for me.  This is a part of my journey.  I appreciate comments and well-wishes, etc.  If someone else can gain something from my writing, wonderful.  But if not, that’s okay too, because it helps me.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about time.  How it ebbs and flows, how it changes people, how it always seems to go soooo slowly until it goes way too quickly.  I look at my youth whom I have been working with for 6 going on 7 years.  They have grown, and matured, and changed so much.  And some of that I only see when I look at photos from when I started at my current job.

I think about all of my friends who have gotten married, and had babies (and babies and babies).  Wasn’t it yesterday that we were catching the bus to middle school? Or studying our nights away in Slocum during college?  Where did the time go?

Time is especially bittersweet for me today.  Okay, let’s be honest, its way more bitter than sweet.  I guess more appropriately it could be described as bitterbittersweet (kind of like NNW is to NW).  Today is a huge time marker for me.  I’ve cried a lot: when I posted on Instagram this morning, on the car ride in listening to music, in my office at various points as I’ve talked to my best friends, in public at lunch this afternoon (at least I know myself well enough to have brought tissues with me!), and almost during our Board meeting tonight when we were asked about things that were keeping our attention away from the meeting at hand.  It’s okay to cry.  It’s okay to mark the time, and to admit that 6 months is hard.  Emotions are a part of life, a part of each moment in time.  And we have to realize that without the sad we may not enjoy or even notice the happy.

And so today, like many days, I embrace the tears. I embrace the rain that came and the feeling of God crying with me.