graduate.d.

Once, I graduated from college. I celebrated (cautiously) a few months early, and so when I really did it, when I really stepped off BYU campus for the last time as a student, it didn't feel big like that. I was just trying to get to Christmas.

After graduation I had nightmares for months that I'd forgotten some logistical detail and didn't really have a degree. There was something more I had to do, a hidden hoop I somehow didn't know I had to jump through. Like how I forgot to get a tassel and Jared handmade me one on the morning of the graduation ceremony. It was perfect--my husband bailing me out for a detail I've overlooked, again.

I have no idea what the future holds for me, what exactly I'm meant to do in the world with my music and my voice and my words and my photographs. But I know, for sure, that I was meant to get the degree I got, with all the blood, sweat and tears. It stretched me wide open and God knew I'd need it.

Now there's a baby girl kicking inside me and I want her to know what her momma did. That her momma loved this thing fierce but somehow the love got away, and even when it did she kept moving through. I want her to know that even if the love never comes back I'll still be proud and not regret. That even if I never sing much or direct much I'll know those hours I poured into that piece of paper were where my heart needed to get jostled around and molded into the one that can love her fierce.

I can't leave these people out. They listened to me cry and lament first about how I did't know what I was going to do with my life. Then they listened to me cry about how heartbreaking it was not to get in, and then, to more crying about how hard it was once I got in. Still more crying when I lost the love that kept me up at night scribbling down teaching techniques and instead was up late imagining photographs. They invested in me and believed in me and told me I could do it and they really believed I could. Mom especially was on the other end of a lot of tear-soaked phone lines and I am so thankful for her grace, for her perfect and tender handling of all my emotions through all of school. Words are really wimpy in trying to say all that my blessed parents did and gave and were so that I could live the dream and go to college. Whow. What can you even say about the people who give you everything and still hold you up and tell you all the wonderful things about yourself that you can't see. This love is big.

God does amazing things with my life when I let him in.