Happy Unendings

Yesterday two middle school girls had a sleep over at our place.  So I guess it was me that had the sleep over.  We watched a Japanese drama.  There is so much kindredness to be felt because you share a TV show with someone, it becomes a much more dramatic feeling when the show is a subtitled JDrama few others would like; even more noticeable when it's a 30 year old woman sitting down with two 13 year old girls (hilarious girls who have great sass and character!).

It's intimidating, other women tell me, to talk to teenagers.  Is it?  Most of them are just people; just younger; just sweeter (mostly); just more open hearted and tender with their words, although biting words are also used as loosely, too.  I stayed up late with two 13 year old girls, chatting about dreams and hopes and crushes and sometimes the mommy banter popped out.  But was it mommy-ish to remind them of the same things I prayed over and over and over at the same age?   I don't think it was, it was just me now, and then: The same scared little girl trying to remember her heart's priorities.

Proverbs 4:23 Above all else, guard your heart, 
   for everything you do flows from it.

and

Song of Solomon 2:7 Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you by the gazelles and by the does of the field: Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.

I suppose it was mommy-ish when I told them how I had been lucky, blessed, annointed (take your pick);  to never have loved (in the ultimate romantic sense) anyone besides Husband.  (My heart had been tender to others, even hurt by others; there has been more than enough drama but it was never given away in love.  I think the girls LOVED hearing that a guarded heart doesn't mean missing out on drama, at least, I know the 13 year old me I would have been quite relieved to hear I wouldn't miss out on the tears and intensity!)  God answered those fervently prayed scriptures.  Acknowledging Him was--and is--knit into every syllable as I would sing the lines from "Come Thou Fount" that say, "Prone to Wander, Lord, I feel it; prone to leave the God I love. Here's my heart, Lord, take and seal it, seal it for Thy courts above."  In the end, there is no heavier reality than the future beyond the life we're living now.  It is hard to see, it is hard to remember, but the soul is always tugging in the direction home.   

In the end, we laughed equally over each others' dramas, and ooed our pains and concerns.  I didn't give most of the conversation a second thought, which is probably why it was so easy and real: nothing was distracted with the concern: Do I awkwardly interject with grown-up wisdom?  

To my lovely friends, amazingly enough (not really amazing, is it? It's how things are meant to be), my added bit of mommy-ness experience recounting was true romance, beyond looking for Edward Cullen,or Mr. Darcy, and sudden happy endings in general.  We laughed over the quotes from hilarious fights; Toddlers mishaps, and stories of how our happy ending continues.  And I think we all needed to hear and know that there is such a thing as a sweet and simple Happy Unending.