I started thinking about my high school graduation in eighth grade. I blame it on the fact that my older sister had just started college, and when I went to visit her on campus, I wanted to stay. College life looked so cool. 

Then, I started “dating” a senior. I would say blame that on the fact our school was eighth through twelfth grade, except we met at the local ice skating rink. Going to the same school only encouraged the relationship. “Senior Boyfriend” introduced me to his other friends who were also seniors, and all of them too had me thinking about the future.

Until, we broke up. Then he and all of my new friends graduated. And I still had four more years of high school. Their lives were beginning a new chapter, when mine felt like it would never end.

I was caught in the in between.

I had all of these dreams about where I’d like to go to college, and what I wanted to do with my life. Only, I was stuck in Algebra. Left to ask questions like who would I sit with at lunch? And who was I going with to homecoming? In between places are not fun.

Yet no one told high school me that most of our lives would happen in the in between. In the time between Freshman year and graduation, getting our first job and getting THE job, wanting a relationship and finding THE relationship, getting married and having kids, etc.—the bulk of our lives are lived. Further, no one told me it’s these very spaces between all of our BIG moments that make us who we become.

It’s in these times that we build character, memories, and even our dreams. It’s where we learn to fall and get back up. It’s where we meet and sometimes even lose our closest friends. These in between spaces hold a million moments of laughter and tears. They’re where we find out what we’re made of, and if our dreams are worth holding on to. And yet,

Everything in us wants to rush them.

We want the diploma. We want to buy the white dress. We want to move into the corner office. We want the stick to turn blue. We want our daily lives to look like a coffee shop scene in Friends, where we always have our closest people with us.

We want to arrive, but most of life is the journey.

Most of life is the ordinary, get yourself to work, put in your time type days. It seems unfair, or at minimum, not at all a fun way to do life. Yet I am beginning to realize that as people, we have our priorities flipped. Understandably, we crave the BIG moments. Only it took me almost thirty years to see that it’s the in between ones that matter most.

“No one told me it’s these very spaces between all of our BIG moments that make us who we become.”

If you had told eighth grade me with the senior boyfriend, that I’d be almost thirty before I got married, I would have been shocked. Upset even. But it was during the single, in between years of my twenties, when I learned to tell my story. It was in these years that I found healing and grew as a person in ways I didn’t know were possible. And it was in the unplanned and unwanted time, that I began to become the person I always wanted to be.

When I finally started dating my husband, our relationship was better than I imagined. All because during the in between years I became a more whole me. God had done things in the in between time, that wouldn’t have happened in the BIG moments.

But my story of singleness is only one of many in between stories of my life. If we had more time, I could tell you of all the gifts the journey has for us in these unplanned, seemingly boring seasons. However, I can encourage you not to despise the in between place you are in right now. Whether it is in your job, relationships, or even where you live, know that important things can happen right where you are. Better yet, important things are happening. You need only to look more closely.

What is your in between?

Lean in a little further, what is happening just below the surface of your life?

 

Would you like more from Melissaschlies.com delivered to your inbox?

If so, subscribe here.