Growing up

When I was little I used to read books and I would wish for the life that the characters had and I used to believe once I reached that age my life would be perfect. When I was 12 or so I was very clumsy and out of place and I would read books and the main girl was in high school, she was smart, beautiful, went to parties, had her own car, had a cell phone, and yes you guessed it she had a boyfriend. I used to look in the mirror and try to see what I would like when I was "all grown up". When I was 15 I began to wonder why my life hadn't played out like I had planned for it to, after all I was in high school and I was almost sixteen and yet the only person I matched from my stories where the geeks and social rejects. My friends all seemed to match the girl that I thought we all grew up to be, they where beautiful, they had perfect hair, they always knew what to say and of course they had boys who followed them around wanting to date them.

Here I am at seventeen and very little of what I once dreamed would happen when I "grew up" has happened and I want very little of it to happen now. I have a job and can nearly buy a car, but I don’t see it as just a "ticket to freedom" as I once did now I see the payments, insurance, tags, inspections, and all the other things that my mother so graciously told me about!
I'm fairly bright, I wouldn't call my self smart but I wouldn't call my self stupid. I used to think that high school was all about parties and hanging out and those good grades just happened. Yeah right, I'm at the point where I realize that "hey if I wanna finish high school, I'm going to have to bare down and start cracking the books!" I'm also at the point where instead of reading the silly novels that I normally would check out from the library I've started checking out "how to ace your SAT's" and "how to survive Algebra" and books like that.
Cell phone? Well I started looking and instead of seeing the major "cool factor" I see a phone bill and a practical way to stay safe when I start driving my self around.

Beautiful, that’s one that I use to look for in the mirror everyday, to see if I had "blossomed" into a beautiful teenager that would be able to turn heads and have people say "wow! That girl is beautiful!" This is one that I wish I had learned along time ago. No matter how much I wished for straight blond hair and bright blue eyes I never got it, I never got a tan either.
Then one day I really looked at my self from some one else’s eyes, I had gotten a birthday card from a dear friend that said something like, Sydney your a very sweet girl, your beauty is in your smile and the way you include others and make them seem important...you make others feel beautiful. That’s when I really realized that I didn't want to be like the girls that I had read about, that I didn't have to meet this imagery stander before I could be considered grown up. I had already started down that road. It slowly dawned on me that I'm not some one in a book, I'm a real live person that already has her future written down; the only difference is my story has been written by the Master Author and not by some mere human author! The pages of my life and yours are being penned even as you read this and while I write this. God can see the full story where as we can only see what has already happened. We see what we want to be and what we are; God sees what we will be.