 |
| Allysee Shank |
I
had always thought becoming a “woman” meant I was to put childish ways
behind me. Womanhood was to be a time when I became serious about life.
When I was a woman, I would have a husband and some kids and a house.
Maybe I’d have a job, and maybe I’d have brunches with old girlfriends
from my childhood…
At
21, I was getting ready to start my last year of college. I was single,
living with two roommates in a city five hours from home, and just
returning from a study abroad trip I’d taken the previous semester. I
was enjoying it all with the usual ups and downs of young-adult life.
While I was happy and enjoying life, I still felt like I was “killing
time” more than living.
See,
at that point in my life, I had so far finished what was expected of
me. I had hit all the milestones that everyone is “supposed to” hit at
that age. There was just one thing that threw me off, and that was the
fact that I was still very much single.
However, that year I read a book.
It
was one of those books that I would have never picked up. The cover
didn’t look like a style I’d enjoy. It was a devotional-type book, and I
never really was able to finish those. This book fell into my hands on
Christmas as a gift from my mother.
The book, Lady in Waiting,
by Jackie Kendall and Debby Jones, helped give me perspective on my
life; and, ultimately, made me realize that I was (at that very moment)
already a woman.
In Lady in Waiting,
there is a story about a friend of the writer. This friend was the only
one of her group of friends to still be single by the time they’d all
reached their late twenties. She goes on to explain how her friend
finally stopped eating off paper plates and starting eating off her fine
china because she realized she had been denying herself simple
pleasures in life, chalking it up to her “waiting” for her life to
begin.
This
story stuck out to me. It was something similar to an incident that
very month where I’d put a plate set back on the shelf at Ross because I
wasn’t sure if my “future husband” would care for the color.
Long
story short, this book made me realize it was okay to “eat off the fine
china.” I needed to embrace living. I realized I had been waiting for
my life to “begin” (cue Tangled song), but, in fact, my life was already in full swing.
This
was such a key moment in my life! I’ve never looked back. I’ve never
felt incomplete. More to the point, I knew I was a woman, not a girl,
just the way I was. An amazingly peaceful feeling came with that
realization.
I
highly recommend the book. It’s a beautiful picture of how complete any
woman or girl can be in pursuing a relationship with God. It taught me
to throw aside all my goals of having a career or having a family and
just find my own identity. Now, I feel like whenever those things happen
in my life, I’m better for it all now.
Allysse Shank, Founder of I Made Lemonade. San Antonio, TX. Offering a platform for others to give hope to the doubting. http://imadelemonade.com/
Click here to read the next one
Post a Comment