Milestones

As a youngster looking forward to the future, I remember thinking of milestones as moments in life that would be good and big and wonderfully memorable, things like my sweet 16 birthday, graduating high school and going on to college, getting married, and having children. No wait, that’s not what I looked forward to at all. That’s what I thought I was expected to look forward to. But in fact, I didn’t want to graduate high school. I loved the familiarity of school, the routine, the hard work of it without the bills to pay. I didn’t want to grow up and have to work with people I didn’t know, pay bills, grocery shop and cook. It all terrified me.

So, in looking back on my life now, I can see the milestones that shaped me. And I can see what milestones really are. They’re not the Hallmark created moments that culture says we all need to experience in order to have a happy life. They are the moments in life, big and small, that leave a mark, that guide our paths, that cause us to turn this way or that in our life’s plan and trajectory. They may even be moments in time that can be easily missed if we’re not watching for them. They can go by so terribly fast. We have to be purposeful and deliberate to watch for them, to stall time during them, to enjoy the people who are involved in them.

Some of the milestones are horrendously painful, especially in the midst of transformative change. But if we can be vulnerable in those painful moments, talking through the hardship with people who care, seeking wise counsel and advice on next steps, those hardest milestones can become the biggest launching pads to usefulness, shaping and molding the good that can come out of them.

Some of the milestones are so fleeting, you have to sort of catch them, like a lightning bug. But then you can’t hold on to them forever either. You have to just store those memories for future recollection, for tying them together into a string of milestones, forming a legacy. The best example of this is raising children. They grow so fast, and we can get so easily caught up in the difficulties of raising children that we can miss the tiny but monumental moments that make it all worth the while. Because when we live life capturing the milestones, and when the kids grow up and move out, you won’t remember the time they broke your favorite frame, you’ll remember the times they took your breath away and filled your heart to overflowing.

Some of the milestones can be ambivalent, big moments of life, but we’re not quite sure how we feel about them. Those take some reflection and piecing together. This can be difficult and take some time, even years before arriving at an answer. But when the answer comes, it can be very sweet. Sometimes the answer comes before we even realize it, and then one day we can trace our behavior back to the milestone that we didn’t even realize had been a milestone at the time.

And then once you grasp the power of living life looking for milestones, knowing that they happen all the time, life becomes a very exciting journey, all the time. I wake up wondering what milestone will happen today, every day. I wake up saying good morning to God, thanking Him for another day of life, and asking Him to help me see what He has in store for me today, to equip me be useful in that thing, and then I give Him glory in advance.

Each day is a gift. Each day is a milestone. Each day has memorable moments with people we care about, with God, even with strangers. It’s exciting to look at life through this lens.

These are my milestones.