This Pilgrim’s Progress Report

In January of 2009, I started blogging. I’m giving myself a pilgrim’s progress report.

In the book Secrets in the Dark, by Frederick Buechner, he suggested that the reader write a letter to the person he or she hopes to be in 15 years. I did that.

So from that galaxy far, far away in the past, these were some of my hopes in 2009.

Hopes vs. Goals

Blogging is a goal. Hopes have to do with the kind of person I want to be. Who I am from the inside out.

I hope that in fifteen years I’m still having toothpaste wars with my husband. Do you envision two nuts with loose bolts squeezing toothpaste on each other, making a mess that I myself would have to clean up? Wrong. Toothpaste wars is what we call the contest where the person who fails to squeeze out enough paste for one teeth-washing and therefore must throw the empty tube in the trash and then open a new tube of toothpaste, that person loses. Born of the “waste not, want not” of my upbringing, this contest showed my husband there was much more in the flattened tube than he realized. Now he’s a believer. And I hope we still like each other in fifteen years, that we continue to derive pleasure from the ridiculous.

I hope that no matter how much water goes under whatever bridges crossed that I’m still good friends with everyone who considers me their friend now. I hope not to have lost anyone––”oh no, not one“––through neglect or misunderstanding or putting a project or a principle before the person. I could say more, but it would get icky like toothpaste.

I hope that in fifteen years I’m not worried about my weight, my age, my skin or my hair color, that I have made peace with the person who occupies this transient vehicle––miraculous marvel that it is.

I hope to have shed personal ambition while maintaining the motivation to be involved with others building something instead of merely critiquing what others have built.

I hope I will still want to write and take pictures, to communicate through words and images something worth noticing, admiring or remembering. I hope I still have faith in people despite disappointments with individuals and more importantly, disappointments in myself. I know I want forgiveness and moving beyond hurts to healing hurts to characterize my nature.

I know I want to turn out to be softer and to live more simply, to shed the acquisitive instinct in favor of realizing life “every, every minute,” as Emily said in Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town.

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A few of my hopes written down and shared, back then I ended with these words, “In the meantime, I will keep squeezing all that I can get out of this toothpaste tube we call life.”

Since Then, What?

Once upon a time, a man who had written a book came to our town to talk about the message in his book. When I met him, I asked him to sign his book for me, which he did.

Years later, he came back, and again I was invited to a dinner where he was the guest of honor. Again, like a groupie, I took his book with me to the home where he was staying and presented his book for him to sign a second time.

What he wrote made me laugh. And has kept me laughing all these years later.

“Nothing has changed!” he wrote.

The words in a book do not move around to suit us. Yet the message carried in our lives can change and communicate meaning that touches the lives of others.

While I still hold to the hopes I wrote out in 2009––those have not changed––so many other things in my life have changed around me.

The man who wrote the book was Major Ian Thomas: The Saving Life of Christ.

He was right about that, you know. When it comes to the message in the Bible, “Nothing has changed.”

“We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure” Hebrews 6:19.