Not that that title refers to anyone specifically, of course. It’s only that I’ve been thinking (a dangerous business, Frodo!). Ruth turns nineteen in just a few weeks. I meant to write something of this nature for her then, but our conversation this morning before work prompted a stream of thoughts that I feel sure will be lost if they are not captured now.

lesson one: do not hide

Quite simply, I was struck today by how well I remember turning nineteen. I think that’s perhaps the most beautiful thing about being spaced as closely together as I and my siblings are – especially with regard to my sisters. That is not to say that all of our situations are identical, but there is certainly a greater degree of sympathy available because nineteen is not so far from twenty.

lesson two:there are right ways to fight

Yes, I remember turning nineteen. It was almost two years ago – was it two years? – and I was contemplating a good few things, and a few good things. I had already decided that I was taking that spring semester off, but by the time the last week of January and my nineteenth birthday rolled around the thing was settled; enrollment was closed, and there would be no changing my plans. I had also made up my mind to spend the spring away at Grandmutti’s, going jobless and largely internetless into a place foreign in all respects except Mutti’s company. And a few weeks after I turned nineteen, I pierced my ears – something no one in my immediate family had ever done before.

Truly, my nineteenth birthday was marked by great changes, and I can’t say I regret any of them. Wonder where my life would have wandered without them, yes; wish I had done differently, never. My spring with Mutti was a much-needed stretch as well as a great refresher, and I needed to learn to know God as good apart from school. (I think I need not mention that I have never regretted the earrings.)

if you have questions, we can talk through the night

One thing that became most apparent in that nineteenth year – and especially in the first four months of it – was how essential it was (is) to know myself as Christ’s, first and foremost. All the things I had derived security from previously were not torn from me completely, but they were distanced in a way that very often felt like loss. And, as I slowly grew to realize, it would be loss – without Christ. Love is never enough without Christ, whether it is the love of a family living in your own house or three states away. It cannot be enough; it is not properly, completely love. And though the human emotions and mind may linger in a state of self-deception and find a variety of relationships and pursuits ‘enough,’ the soul will always return to hunger for the real deal. The mind will chafe and grow weary; the emotions flap about like a tattered pennant at the whim of an angry wind.

I need love. I need Christ.

I've been where you're going and it's not that far.

But it was not only the distance crossed that taught me; it was the getting there. There is a frustrating sort of beauty to having a secondhand, vaguely unreliable car – and that is, that either a road trip can set your teeth on edge and be a hideous disaster, or you can be thankful for every mile of new and beautiful countryside that is crossed without the car bursting into smoke and flames and flying off the road like the mythical dragons that color my Tolkien-saturated imagination. 

it's too far to walk, but you don't have to run;

you'll get there in time.

To put it into another literary context: are you Eustace, or have you read the right sort of books? Are you Eustace? Are you going to be seasick over the potential disasters and all the little things that make you uncomfortable, bewailing the fact that rural Kansas and Illinois are really just boring? Or have you read the right books – do you even know what adventure and beauty look like? Does the apparent tedium of the scenic route simply press you to look even more closely for the glimmers of glory, the backwards forms of beauty, the crumpled creases of grace that spatter every mile of our lives? These are the questions that crossing great distances in doubtful vehicles presses one to answer.

lesson three: you’re not alone

It is much the same now that I am twenty (yeah, that day three-hundred-sixty-five days later doesn’t really alter much in the human soul). There is some distance between the things of my childhood that made me secure, a distance that is intended (I think) to make me look beyond the childhood-things to a source of security and love that outlasts distances of fifty or fifty-thousand miles. There is a Love that makes things of the present lovely just as it has made the things of the past. The tragedy is to love the things in either place better than Love Himself. 

not to undermine the consequence, but you are not what you do

There is still, at twenty, the odd press to wonder where this road is going, wonder who and what and where lies at the other end. There still remains the constant temptation to slam my hand on the wheel because the vehicle is slow and unsteady, the constant lure to use the rearview mirror to look back at the Egypts where I have lingered. But this is the road I am on, these are the people I have been called to love, and if the going is slow it merely gives us all the more time to enjoy the here.

when you need it most, I have a hundred reasons 

why I love you. 

I don’t exactly know what I meant this to be; it threatens to be a lecture or a biography, and I didn’t intend it to be either. Whatever it is, I say it as a sister, joined to you by our parents’ blood. They say that blood is thicker than water, but there is another bond between us stronger than the shared blood of a sister, and it is both blood and water streaming from the side of the God-Man, like mercy falling from heaven itself. I suppose in the end this must become a prayer to the giver of such mercy, to the Life who took on death for us: a prayer that is wholly hope and wholly thanksgiving, that you and I will be kept, never loving the people or the rate or the scenery for themselves but always for the redemption we have known and the love we taste and the beauty that lies before us, because we are known by such a great Saviour.

Thank you, Father, for such a love and such a Saviour.

if you weather love and lose your innocence,

just remember: lesson one.

Jars of Clay, "Boys (Lesson One)"