This weekend, my family joined me as I graduated from the inaugural TIDEL Fellowship through Union Theological Seminary. This was an 18-month fellowship and I listened to the keynote on the importance of techno-selectivity in the an AI world, I realized just how much life we had lived in 18 months. We had lived in three different houses. During the launch of the fellowship, I was holding a two-month-old newborn. The last time we met, I had a seven-month-old in tow. My fellow fellows were shocked to see a curly-headed toddler as we gathered to celebrate our journey.
When we are kids in school, there are so many milestones…walking, talking, potty-training, moving to a big kid bed, graduating kindergarten, finishing each grade level, finishing high school. It seems like you can’t go too long with our celebrating and experiencing a major development.
But as adults, it’s harder to determine where the milestones are. Certainly the birthdays that mark a decade of living fit the bill, but so many are attached to our children and not to our own journeys. Being able to think about what I have learned not only in this fellowship, but about life this weekend was what I needed. I needed to remember that we have milestones too…sometimes big ones and many times ones that are filled with grief and reminders of loss.
In the Old Testament, God meets someone and they respond by building an altar or making a pillar as a reminder: “Here in this place is where I met and heard from God.” Because life moves so fast, we often don’t get the chance to stop and say, “Here is the place where I met God and we passed through this milestone together.”
But every once and awhile, the milestone comes and you get the chance to pause and remember where you have been and who you have become since you first began a journey. When those moments come, stop and remember. God was with me when I began the journey. God was with me along the journey. And God is here now in this milestone that marks the end of this journey.
I promise it won’t take long after marking that milestone before the next journey begins.