Ask me again, whether what I have done is my life.   Ask me if the getting up and going to sleep and the moments in between is all there is. Ask me if I lived the heights and depths of my life and all the ordinary moments in between. Ask me if I smelled the frost on my daughter’s hair, smelled the earth on my son. Ask me if I chased my dreams, if I gazed at Christ, if I did everything that was put before me. Ask me I took my place at tables set for me.

Go ahead. Ask me.

Ask me about the words I didn’t write and the walks I didn’t take. Ask me about the people on the margins I left there alone. Ask me about the gifts I hoarded or the risks I didn’t take.

Go ah…wait. Maybe don’t.

No don’t because then I will have to tell you that I get lazy and distracted and caught up in the ordinary. I will tell you I wasted too many evenings this year on facebook and days on netflix. I will tell you that I get nervous sometimes that as I enter the decade of, what statisticians calculate as the most productive of my life, that I am getting it wrong. I will tell you that my heart is madly restless these days, that I am desperate for what the next thing is. I will tell you that this year…I want focus.

I will tell you that every year at this time I say the same thing a different way, that I want to be HERE and in the NOW but also…but also. But also I don’t want to miss a thing. I want to be everywhere, all at once. I want to climb mountain tops and swim with dolphins. I want whatever is meant for me and I don’t want to miss a second of this life or waste it on  regret. This  year, 2015, I want to live with intention and focus and I don’t want life to happen TO me. I want to step into my gifting and I want to do the next million tiny things. I want to stack one tiny thing on top of the next and I want my heart to break and beat for the things of God.

And this isn’t about trying harder or doing more. This is about peeling back scaled eyelids and watching with glittering eyes. This is about not letting my life happen to me, not picking up the phone without thinking. Not skipping between various screens.This is about watching for the opportunities I’m given. This is about paying attention to surprising things that make my heart beat…like writing and preaching and crashing waves and poetry. This is about making space for the things I care about doing. This is about filling myself before I leave the house. About waking just a little early moving and thinking and intentionally planning my days. We are the curators of our lives, the only ones who decide what it is filled with.

My little girl woke me in the night. I held her little hand as I walked her to our bed, I kissed her satin soft skin. Then I spent a long time looking out the window. The sky was bruised deep purple and navy blue. The stars were blazing hot. The trees were so loaded with snow that I thought they might break.

Ask me if I noticed.