On being the parents of 2 adults. . .

When we moved to Kenya, the girls were 5 and 8, high school seemed a millennium away, much less college.

But here we are.

I just returned from moving my almost 21 year old into her first house, and Annabelle is finishing up her college applications and about to turn 18.

As I read Belle’s college essay, I marveled at the way she had synthesized our unusual life away from her passport country with a desire to reveal the beauty necessary to bring about our connection to each other and the world. She has sticky notes outlining what is needed for the colleges she is applying to and munches on her Target trail mix as she balances orders for her new bagel business. She is a mentor to Junior High students and managing the senior store and the guy’s varsity soccer team.

As I spent the week with Madeline in Michigan, she was locked in on organic chemistry and virology and physics, preparing for a life of diving into people’s stories as she looks toward medical school. She created a haven in her room with fairy lights and sage greens (that matched her nursery so long ago) and had a golden map of Kijabe reflecting on top of her desk and lego flowers sent to her from around the world for her 20th birthday. She escapes to the beach for sunset a couple times a week, and the people in her church know her by name. As we mounted quotations on the wall, she and her roommate chose one to greet them as they walked into their study space that said “all is well.”

Our girls (now women) are charting their course with confidence, grace, and humble resolve that I can only sit back and wonder at – they don’t need me to set schedules or figure out food or pick out their clothes for school. They are still happy for me to help organize their closets and search for treasures – and we keep planning adventures, big and small, to soak up more moments with them when we can steal them away. We know, as people keep reminding us, that our job with them is not done. But it is shifting – from caregiver to confidant, from guide to observer.

We trust God with the details of their lives, with the next steps and the next stages – to provide, as He always has, their daily bread and the desires of their hearts. It is a new phase, both helpless and exhilarating- to know that this time next year we will have an empty nest and an ocean between us. . .may we approach it with wisdom and prayer and open hands, knowing that He loves them even more than we do, and has such good things planned for them . . .