Twenty-five years ago, I bought my very first laptop.
I had just started my junior year of college and was weary of camping out in the university computer lab to write papers and do research, so when I found a laptop on sale at Circuit City, I pooled all the money I’d saved working at Hallmark my freshman year and at the dentist’s office my sophomore year, forking over $999 for a heavy, bulky laptop that seemed impossibly small in 2001. The slim pink MacBook in front me cost about that much in 2024, so I’m still shuddering at the price tag of a behemoth laptop that was unfortunately loaded with Windows ME, a software that proved to be so unreliable that all support for it was discontinued a couple of years later.
A lifelong journaler, I decided to try typing my diary entries into a Word document rather than handwriting them in a notebook, mostly because owning this new (and expensive) piece of technology made me feel responsible to use it all the time. Coupling the days of dial-up internet with the severe time limit of NetZero’s free version, I didn’t use my laptop for much more than writing. But I did write. I wrote so much. About four months after purchasing my laptop, I changed my major from social work to English with a writing concentration. Night after night, I sat in my bed writing essays, research papers, literary analyses, poetry, short stories, peer reviews, and, of course, journal entries. I loved it all so much. In one of my journal entries in February 2002, I wrote that after I’d completed my first two weeks of upper-level English courses, I felt like I was finally where I belonged. I had bounced around between education, sociology, and social work, struggling to find a major that fit. One late night, I sat in bed typing into that journal document, frustrated by the social work classes and feeling incredibly out of place. What am I doing with my life? I wanted to obey the Lord, but I could not figure out what obedience looked like. What if I change my major to something I enjoy rather than something I feel burdened to do? When I did, everything felt like a big exhale.
The 2001-2002 journals are revealing. Every day was an existential crisis. I was intimidated by the words after graduation and felt pressure to have my entire future lined up as soon as I moved the tassel from one side of the cardboard hat to the other. If I have to make one more life-altering decision at age twenty, I might go crazy, I wrote in my journal. But underneath the fear of an unplanned future was a fear of veering off the course of what God wanted for me. I was afraid of making the wrong decision, of wrecking his plans, of being selfish with my life. This wasn’t motivated by real fear, though. It was motivated by love. I really did love the Lord, and I really did want to please him. I was immature in my faith, unsure of how to read the Bible, and very much a product of the times which told me I had to be in the “center of God’s will.” But I wanted to obey the Lord, even if I couldn’t picture obedience. The Venn diagram of what I was good at, what I believed God had called me to, and what would support me financially had little to no overlap.
Those journal entries were anxious prayers for the Lord to guide me.
I read through them recently. Because I am a writer and was back then, too, I’d listed the books I was reading at the time, the theological wrestling I was doing, the scriptures I was struggling to understand. Everything is written in minute detail down to the toffee flavored coffee I loved at the coffee shop and lines and lines of dialogue, written down verbatim. In some ways, it’s like reading an epistolary novel about your own life. Reading my twenty-year old thoughts at forty-five makes one thing abundantly clear: the Lord was guiding me. There were many paths I could have traveled down—in career, in relationships, and in theology—and it is clear to me that God was protecting me from the ones that would have wrecked my faith. It seems like everything about me was being shaped and formed in that brief window of time. I read widely, and I was influenced easily. I shudder to think where I’d be if some of the unorthodox writers I loved at the time had captured my heart more firmly that Scripture eventually did.
I can see now that the Lord was pulling me down a path that kept my heart safe, and I didn’t even know he was doing it. I didn’t know that’s what I was praying for. I didn’t know what I needed protection from. But, as my college days slipped by, the Lord continued to keep me. At just the right time, after my first truly broken heart, he brought a young man into my life who made me think about what I believed. This guy was patient with my wonky shaped theology, and he liked me for who I was right then, not who I might one day become. He liked me, the in-process me that I struggled to reconcile with the person I thought I should be. He loved the Lord with all his heart, soul, mind, strength, and nothing had ever been so attractive to me.
I married him.
This was, perhaps, the wisest decision I have ever made, though I was too young to understand the kind of ripple effect I’d be blessed to experience for the next twenty-three years and counting. The first time his name appears in the journal, the reader knows he’s the one who’s come to change the whole story.
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So often, I come to the circumstances in my life with questions for the Lord. What do I do? How do I handle this? Do I even know what I’m doing? Help me understand, help me make a wise decision, help me, help me, help me. In twenty-five years will I look back and see myself being kept in my mid-forties the way I was in my twenties? Will I see the ways God was guiding me when I didn’t know it? Protecting me when I didn’t think I needed it? Keeping me when I might have leaned away from him?
I feel certain I will, he will. Scripture tells me he will. The journals tell me he will.
Twenty-five years ago, my thoughts about God were only beginning to be formed. I read my Bible, desperate to understand but often confused. But then I’d look for him and see him, and I just—well, I just loved him. It was as simple as that. How could you not love him? But all the angst I had about my future seeped away when I started trusting him. Whatever happened, the God of my well-loved (but often misunderstood) Bible was trustworthy with my future.
He still is.
He
Teach me, O Lord, the way of your statutes;
and I will keep it to the end.
Give me understanding, that I may keep your law
and observe it with my whole heart.
Lead me in the path of your commandments,
for I delight in it.
Incline my heart to your testimonies,
and not to selfish gain!
Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things;
and give me life in your ways.
Confirm to your servant your promise,
that you may be feared.
Turn away the reproach that I dread,
for your rules are good.
Behold, I long for your precepts;
in your righteousness give me life!
Psalm 119:33-40
Author’s note:
This is the fourth essay in a series of reflections on Psalm 119. Each article bears the title of the stanza of the psalm from which it draws inspiration. This is 5 of 22.
