Hello, You

If we are going to live the next half of our lives better than the first, we have to get back in touch with who we are and what makes us happy.

If you’re like me, you’ve spent the last few decades bending and giving and morphing to serve so many different people and jobs and communities that you’re no longer sure what’s left of you. You find yourself looking right and left, searching for some semblance of the woman you once were. You don’t know which way to go because you don’t know what you want. That’s okay, neither did I.

It is natural to have seasons in life when you feel a little lost, like you’ve forgotten who you are. What isn’t natural is to stay in that. This is not the time to be fixated on what you didn’t become or didn’t do. That’s done. No one will ever fight harder for you or know what you need more than YOU. Only you can figure out how to fall back in love with you.

When you love you, you think about you. You rediscover your interests, you set your own goals for the future, and define the woman you hope to be, even if you’re still figuring out who that woman is as you go along.

If you’re going to lead the charge into a fulfilling and beautiful second half of your life, make sure the leader of that charge is someone you love. Going into our second half with a fraction of our best selves doesn’t serve the world. It doesn’t honor God or ourselves. We have to put ourselves at the center again and pull ourselves out from under whatever layers life has buried us under—raising kids, work, and cleaning dog poop off the dining room floor again because no one took the dog out. This is your time of rediscovery.

After my journey, I know I am the most perfectly and uniquely qualified person on the planet to pursue the dreams and goals of my next half. I want you to make your own discoveries. I want you to interrogate your deepest self and pull all that makes you you back to the surface.

Jesus, revive in me the joy and passion I once felt. Thank you for making me the woman I am.