2010: The Year of Magical Happenings

I always feel like there's a whole lot of pressure on the first blog post of a new year. Right? Ugh. Just needed to put that out there.

2010, kids. Welcome to the future. Let's talk about belief.

If you've been to my house, you've noticed the "Believe" thing. To be honest, I'm not sure when it started, but at some point in my life, I decided that word was my mantra. Somehow my friends and family got the memo, and I've been gifted everything with the word "believe" on it that any of them have encountered since. So yes, it's a bit much. And yes, I do have the tattoo. I'm sure we've talked about it, my "believe" fixation, but in case you were wondering, here's where it came from:

When I was little, I was surrounded by imaginative, creative, and playful adults. My family created an atmosphere for young me that encouraged belief in all sorts of things, some true and some less true. I was allowed to grow up as slowly as I needed to, allowed to see fairies and unicorns in forests, allowed to talk to animals and aspire to be a butterfly, and allowed to believe in magical everythings. As I grew, I came to my conclusions about reality in my own time. No one ever took the right to believe in anything away from me by telling me I was too old or it was too silly or "duh, just so not real." The adults around me respected the things I believed in purely because I believed in them.

That respect created a capacity for belief in me that I still have today. Obviously, I've figured a few things out - I'm on to the Santa thing, and I get that seagulls don't actually talk to my grandparents. But the freedom I had to believe left me with a perspective that I value above anything else from my childhood - the idea that the world is full of things I can't see, incredible possibilities, endless maybes, and relentless hope. That perspective has shaped my entire life.

I think the ability to believe is one of the most underrated gifts from a generous God to a cynical human race. We're talking about a God who is all powerful and unending, but chooses not to force Himself on us and instead maintains some mystery, making faith necessary and our option to believe the final piece in the puzzle. I don't think He set it up that way to torture and confuse us. I think He did it because believing is good for our souls and necessary for our survival. We can control belief, even when we can't control anything else. We can choose to believe, to hope, in spite of just about anything. Our belief can keep us going. It can keep other people going. It's powerful stuff, our ability to believe.

This is obviously something I can go on and on about. I'll try to wrap it up.

So it's 2010, kids, and I'm a believer. Sometimes I want to turn it off, to be less gullible, to protect my heart and not hope for impossible things all the time. The problem is, impossible things keep happening. So I'm in. This year, let's call for some magical happenings. Let's believe for the sake of believing, because it makes us better, because it works, because we're designed to hope for and trust in things unseen.

Anything can happen. Anything.

love.