Someone Made It

I'm moving into a new place in a couple of weeks (where that new place is, God only knows -- hopefully He'll share this piece of information with me soon). This means I have two weeks to find an apartment, pack up my stuff, run a 1/2 marathon, move into a new place, and celebrate my 23rd birthday. Am I stressed? Well....yes, a little bit. But these are all good things, and I can count more blessings than I can problems. "That's the attitude, Jules!" Maybe, but I guarantee that plenty of complaining is on the horizon.

Whenever I pack up to move from one house to another, I always come across evidence of both some of the darkest and the sweetest things in my life. Even though it slows the process significantly, I enjoy rummaging through old pictures and journals. Journal entries are great places to remember how much you've grown. I can recover some of the things I learned even a year ago and have since forgotten.

Yesterday, I came across a journal entry that, for some reason, haunted me. Not because it was scary or extraordinary (or even well-written or thought-out), but because I can't remember having written it. And it was only last year. The first line caught my attention, like I had picked up a random novel in a bookstore. From then on I felt like I was reading someone else's words. It was moving and strange. Last year's me (a ghost) had some things to share with this year's me...things that this year's me had forgotten:

"What if we all thought like Amelia, with her constant insistence that 'someone made it'? Two and a half year old Amelia Twit has taught me a lesson with her simple yet very profound words. She showed me all the little toys in the room, pointed to the different colors, looked up at me with her big brown eyes and said, 'Someone made it.' It became the mantra for the evening I was with her. I wish it could become my mantra for life. I wish that every time I looked into the eyes of someone I have known for the longest time, or someone I have only just met, I could hear Amelia's voice saying, 'Someone made him.' It's something so crucial to understanding the significance behind all we come into contact with in our lives -- that Someone was the mastermind behind that face. Someone made the eyes that cry out for hope and acceptance. It's so easy to forget, too, especially when we are insistent upon the idea that everything good in our lives comes from ourselves. With this type of selfish mindset, we miss out on so much -- we miss out on recognizing the different evidences surrounding us, all of which are pointing to the God who made everything."