Manry Family

I have always been thankful that our calendars identify landmarks in the year, such as birthdays and holidays, to prompt self-reflection.  These special days allow us to say to ourselves, "last year I was doing or thinking this way, but look how I've changed."  My favorite markers, however, for defining particular eras of my life have been the start and completion of a journal. 

Yesterday I filled the last page of a journal that I began writing in June 30, 2003.  Since that time I've been to Guatemala twice, the second time bringing home my daughter Lydia Jane, who has been quite busy finding new ways to wrap me around her finger.  I've also undergone one of the more significant transformations of my life as I discerned God's calling me and my family to Jinja, Uganda to be missionaries there.  When the last page was finished I marveled at what God had done in me and my family's life over the past couple of years.

Surpassing the joy of reflecting on those exciting developments in my life is the anticipation of what I might be writing in the pages of the new journal I just inserted into my lworn leather cover.  I can only imagine what these yet-to-be-experienced relationships and realities might be as I will continually encounter familiar and unfamiliar people and places on the path that lays before me now.  It is not a naïve hope or blind optimism that causes me to feel this way.  I realize that some of these experiences I'll be journaling will be painful or difficult, perhaps more so than anything I have previously experienced before.  I am filled with expectations over what will fill my new journal because my old journals have proven to me over and over God's faithfulness, God's goodness, and God's sovereignty.  All I see right now in this journal are blank pages, but He has been writing in them my entire life.