For as long as I can remember I’ve had an unrelenting ache to be known. When I’m caught in a confrontation, it isn’t as much about being right as it is about being seen, heard, understood. While I’m rounding the corner to my thirties this week, I think about those three decades, what they’ve meant, who’s walked beside me, who’s let me slip away, and there’s a phrase I read last week that I just can’t shake.

I HAVE FORMED YOU.  – Isaiah 44

What I don’t remember is where we were or the age I was when I did this. What I do remember, was looking for the familiarity of knee-length ironed shorts, the aroma that is my mother, and her safe form I was certain would shield me from the shyness that was creeping in when I looked up at foreign faces. I found her, squeezed her thigh as only a toddler can, and then was caught by surprise when the person attached wasn’t my mom at all.

I HAVE FORMED YOU.  -Isaiah 44

Our kitchen carpet was like a kaleidoscope of oranges and browns, like all carpet laid in the 80’s. It was morning. And it was my birthday. I squealed and lowered into a crouch with my hands out like I was about to receive the biggest balloon of all my short years. “I can’t believe I’m nine!”

I HAVE FORMED YOU.  -Isaiah 44

Midwest summer days nearly suffocated me. Still, it was better than school. My cousin and I tromped around the fields, dodging bees and boredom in the in-between of elementary. We wound our way through the strawberry patch and picked our afternoon snack. Sweat tickled my ears when I brushed dirt from the red wonders I ate, and memories etched into my mind, not letting me go even 20 years later.

I HAVE FORMED YOU.  -Isaiah 44

Standing in front of my peers I suddenly couldn’t get away. The desks were too close, the eyes were all on me. I wanted to speak what I was going to say but in a rush I went to the bathroom. “It’s a panic attack, not a heart attack,” the doctor later said. It came to be the first of many.

I HAVE FORMED YOU.  -Isaiah 44

We drove over a day to get home from Texas, my mom and I. More than once. In the desolate, dry spans of Oklahoma we made up songs. Particularly about the friend of ours with big lips, the one we’d just visited. (He knows who he is, and he’s proud of his smacker.) Each phrase ended in a rhyme, the beat consistent through the words.

I HAVE FORMED YOU.  -Isaiah 44

I didn’t make it to the end of the driveway before I broke down in tears. I wanted a baby, and my friend had just announced she was having one. What if I never hold my own, a part of Chase and a part of me? What if there’s something wrong with me? Or him? What if it never happens? In the days that followed I learned why I was so emotional. That the girl who is now one year from a two-digit birthday was already growing.

I HAVE FORMED YOU.  – Isaiah 44

Yesterday my kids were outside in their bare feet, when they weren’t roller blading or getting their socks wet. They were breaking apart the crumbs of a snowman they built over the weekend, a large mass refusing melt. I was kneeling by the new green of my lilies starting to peek from the ground unaware that today we’d be 30 degrees with more white falling from the sky.

When I struggle to know how to do this life, when I have mornings I don’t want to make lunches or agreements on how much Wii will be allowed later. When the cold of the day seeps too deep into my soul, I remember One who hasn’t left since I was too small to see with the naked eye and just starting in the womb. He hasn’t missed a moment, a skinned elbow, a tear, or a laugh.

“And another will write on his hand, ‘Belonging to the Lord.'” -Isaiah 44:5

And He won’t miss the ones ahead.