Seventy-Five Years....summing it up.

Seventy-five Years

How is that possible?

I haven’t yet achieved greatness!

I haven’t written a best seller or won a Grammy or been awarded the Nobel Prize.  I have somehow slipped through the cracks of childhood, youth, and middle age and landed in senior land.    The likelihood of distinguishing myself from this vantage point seems slim.

So how have I filled up the time in the past 75 years?

Hmmm….if I start to recount the activities of those decades, it is going to sound something like an obituary.  I’m not sure I want to write that yet!

But…by the grace of God…

*I survived some serious illness as a small child.  I had pneumonia twice and a kidney infection before the age of 4 at a time when an array of antibiotics was not available.

*I enjoyed my years in school and was an excellent student, but I had little self-confidence.  I was not popular in high school, although I had a small circle of close friends.

*I had an innate love of music and found it to be a wonderful source of expressing the thoughts of my mind and feelings of my heart.  I had some amazing opportunities to use that gift from childhood and into my 50s.

*I became a nurse.  It is difficult to begin to explain to someone who has not shared those experiences what it does to a person to see life and death in such an intimate way.

*I paid my own way through college.  What a lot of hard work that was!

*I met the love of my life and have spent the last 52 years building that relationship.

*I became a teacher…in high school, junior college, community and church.  Eventually I got a Masters degree in adult education.

*We raised 4 children.   All of them had some portion of their education in home-schooling.  I had a total of 16 years experience as a home-schooling parent.

*I was involved in some community activities, but primarily my volunteer activities were church related.  Over the years, I served on and chaired multiple committees….nursery, hospitality, music, nominating, Christian education, Sunday School.  I served on the Governing Board at one church and was Church Clerk at another.

*After the children were raised, I worked as an outreach coordinator for a small rural hospital.  It was a job with lots of variety.  Retiring from that, I did outreach for the local Cancer Service Program.

*After retiring from retirement, I tutored high school subjects both privately and for the local city school district.

* I have had poetry published.  I have written and performed my own music…none of it published, however.

* I have knit more sweaters and sewn more clothes than I can count…or remember.  I have also enjoyed crocheting and embroidering.  I have made several quilts.

*I have never been an athlete, but I have at various times enjoyed bowling, cross-country skiing, swimming and ice-skating.  I still enjoying swimming and ice-skating and have done both in the past 3 months.

*I have done quite a bit of home maintenance in the form of painting and wall-papering, both of which I genuinely enjoy.  I have also refinished several pieces of furniture.  I am delighted when I see the beauty in the grain of the wood.

*Gardening has been fun for me.  My husband has done the hard work of tilling and weeding.  I get to do the fun part of planting and harvesting.

*Cooking and baking have been great activities.  I dislike the clean-up afterward, but that’s part of the game.

*I have traveled more than I imagined I would when I was a young person.  I have been to all but 7 of the 50 states and have been on four continents.

*I have a great love of books and reading.  I read mainly periodicals and non-fiction, but I do enjoy novels by John Grisham and Randy Singer.

*I am quite addicted to crossword puzzles (especially New York Times puzzles) and Sudoku (but only the very difficult ones).  I have played around with creating decoding puzzles for kids.

*I was an early user of computers.  I learned to program Fortran in the 60s.  I still frequently use Word, Publisher and Powerpoint.

*The unifying thread of my life has been my relationship with Jesus as my Savior and Sustainer.  I rarely miss reading the Bible on a daily basis.  I have lost track of how many times I have read it cover to cover.  I pray throughout the day looking for guidance, for wisdom, for help in setting priorities. 

There is a part of me that wishes I had done something truly spectacular in the past 75 years, but there is another part of me that realizes that I have tried every day to do what I believed God planned for me for that day, so I need to be content with the sum of those days, and the point at which I find myself.

And there is also this….earlier this week, I did a video chat with my grandchildren in California.  The 5 and 3 year olds were showing me how they have learned to make their beds.  As they spread the quilts I had made for them over the top of their beds, the 5 year old said, “The quilts you made for us make us feel special.”  If I have done something to make each of my eleven grandchildren feel special, I am satisfied with my life.