Getting Old..

So, it seems that I am getting old.  My oldest turns 15 today, actually - specifically - about 10 minutes ago.  We almost lost him - he was an emergency C-section.  I am so proud of my son.  I can't say it enough.  He is amazing.

Couple with that, I had to take off my glasses to see to remove stitches while sewing the other day.  I knew that couldn't be a good sign.

The final straw was a few weeks ago.  I woke up, and was stiff and sore, and having a hard time moving.  This has happened before, after an ill-advised decision to start jogging, or a day hiking, or hard yard work.  I had been READING the night before.  When reading is a total-body-sore-the-next-day event, you know it is downhill from there.

I don't know why this is all hitting me so hard.  I don't FEEL old.  Maybe because I am looking 40 in the face.  Not eye-to-eye yet, be she's walking down the street towards me.  I also seem to be more and more aware that it isn't just my kids that are entering new stages of life, I have to grow up and graduate too.  They have their own lives - which they like to remind me of, with great flourishes and drama.  Our lives used to be the same.  They don't need me for everything.  My role has transitioned from the yapping, nipping herd dog rounding them up and moving them along to the guardian on the hill, watching out for big threats.

As I think about being O.L.D.  the verse comes to mind "the grass withers and the flowers fade, but the Word of the Lord stands forever".  As I was  meditating on that, it occurred to me that my role, what I will be, isn't the point.  I will wither and fade, like the grass.  (Hopefully not like the grass at my house this summer.  It was brutal hot. I couldn't keep it green for anything.)  It is humbling to think of myself on the same level as the grass we walk on, and complain about mowing.  What IS important is that whatever this stage of life, or the next, brings that I am living God's Word.  That is all that will remain of me, my only true legacy.

That is comforting.  As a MOM, I have been very secure in that role.  I know it well, what to do, how to live it out.  The next stage, a mom, to older and hairier kids, I am not so sure of.  But as long as I am living out God's Word, I am doing what I should be.  It provides an anchor, a plumbline, a boyscout handbook of sorts, for these coming less-known next 6years, and then the completely unknown years after it.  Thank God I am just grass.  I don't know if I could take the pressure otherwise.