As I near the completion of the ADF Dedicant Program, at age 49, I sometimes look around at my grove-mates in their 20s and 30s -- a time of my life when I was either apathetic or back in the Methodist church -- and envy them that they found this path so much earlier in life than I did and will have that much more time to explore and grow within it..
This post by Teo Bishop reminds me not to devalue my own experiences. Leaving the Methodists in my late teens, returning in my early 30s, leaving again after a marital breakup, finding ADF, putting it aside for a brief try-out of the Episcopal Church, then finally, less than two years ago, starting the path that's led me here. It's all a frantic and fantastic story of confusion and indecision, but for better or worse it has shaped me.
At the same time, though, there are moments when I really wish I had been able to settle into a spiritual path early on and grow within it. I would have some very deep roots by now, and a degree of experience and maturity in the faith commensurate with my age, rather than being, as this blog's subtitle says, a middle-aged beginner.
I've been musing lately on past lives and whether we reincarnate to learn lessons. Maybe in a past incarnation I was one of those lifelong settled religious folk and I need to learn in this one what it's like to be a dabbler driven by doubt and indecision.
In any event ... I'm here now.
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