how-did-i-get-here?

You know every once in awhile in your life when you have moments of how-did-i-get-here? Sometimes those moments may be laced with regrets and unanswered questions, but sometimes those moments are filled with fullness and taste sweet on your tongue. 

The other day when we returned from our vacation, I wrote a little bit about when we first left Kentucky to move home. I mentioned the pain we felt driving away from the city we had lived in for two years-- a city full of people we had grown to love. 

When we loaded up our bright yellow Penske truck, tears rolled down my cheeks when I thought of their faces. The reality was that we would be nearly 10 hours away from these people. Beyond that, our best friends, our "lifers" as I started calling them because I knew full well we would be friends for life, had just moved to Delaware. It felt a lot like grabbing at air when I thought about keeping that lifetime of friendship promise. [I wrote about one of the first times we hung out here]. 

But life was happening around us and we had to move and I knew our friendship with all these people, even our lifers, would be relegated to long road trip travels and late nights and trying to cram in time over a few precious days. And as my mom would have said, I just had to put on my big girl panties and accept it. 

Every year we've managed to make trips back to Kentucky, our lifers eventually moved back there too and so we saw them once or twice a year. I had finally accepted this as the new normal. I worried about visiting and feeling like we were living in the "remember whens" and not having enough moments in the present to sustain what we had built. But we trudged on.

And then we got a phone call. And though all our friends in Kentucky weren't moving closer to us, our lifers were! They would be within an hour and a half drive.

Which brings me to my first thoughts: 

You know every once in awhile in your life when you have moments of how-did-i-get-here? 

Yesterday I had one of those moments. 

Meagan drove up, just for the day, something I never thought was going to be able to happen for us again. 

We had lunch, played with Blythe, got smoothies, and then, after putting Blythe down for her nap, promptly sat down on the couch for nearly four hours and talked and laughed and talked. 

And there it was: how-did-I-get-here?

When I left college I was scared to leave Renae and move to a city foreign to me. I whined and complained and drug my feet a lot. I hesitated to make friends because I told myself I wouldn't be there long so I shouldn't invest. But God knew what I needed. I needed a Meagan. And then I was leaving again and I realized the new me didn't fit in my old home like I thought it might and my friends were miles away. So God struck up His orchestra once again, and yesterday I was reminded how to appreciate the music He plays for me. 

And it played in the voice of my lifer friend, who sat on my couch and listened to my struggles and my hopes and my silly stories just like she used to four years ago.