Rambling on about a bit of Southern truth and the hard roads, God whispers, and making it to higher ground…..

Would my young self even listen to a message from my older self?

Well, bless her heart, no, I seriously doubt it.

Ah, the sweet days of youth, when confidence was plentiful, patience was scarce, and every hard lesson had to introduce itself personally. I learned as I went, attending the School of Hard Knocks with perfect attendance. You might call it a university for the young and stubborn. I was independent, determined, and on a roll to make life my own.

Then one moment changed my direction.

That moment, if I could relive it, might be the very place where older me would try to step in and explain a few things. But younger me was too determined and too focused on being independent, partly because of that moment. She would have looked me straight in the eye and said, “But I can’t do this anymore. I can’t take it. I’m never going to be free from all of this if I don’t leave it behind.”

So I left. And no, it was not an easy road.

It sent me down paths I did not recognize and into places I never imagined I would go. Some were good. Some were bad. Some tested my faith, while others tested every bit of my upbringing. All of them taught me something about surviving and, eventually, thriving.

Thankfully, the lessons I grew up with kept ringing in my head. They gave me balance when life tilted sideways, direction when I could not see the road, and purpose when I wondered whether any of it meant a thing. And then there were those quiet God whispers… not loud, not showy, just steady enough to remind me I was not walking alone.

Advice, when you get right down to it, is mostly words wrapped around somebody else’s experience. Until you have lived enough to understand it, advice can sound like somebody trying to mold you into a shape you never asked to be. When we are young, we are convinced we already know where we are going and exactly what we need.

So no, younger me would not have listened. She would have stared at older me, shocked as all get-out, and said, “WHAT? No. I’m doing what I need to do. I have to be me.”

I can tell my stories now. I can offer a few hints about the morals that steadied me and the God whispers that guided me. Those things are part of the walk for all of us. But if I had told younger me what was coming, or handed her a neat little list of advice, I do not believe it would have changed a thing.

Maybe it would only have given me the chance to look back now and say, “Well, would you look at that. Older me was right.”

But I made it anyway.

There was a whole lot of dirt-road traveling, plenty of trudging through mud, and more than one swamp between me and higher ground. Still, by grace, grit, and a stubborn streak wider than the Mississippi, I kept making it through.

Life is a journey, and every one of us has our own stretch of road to travel. Would it be nice to change a few things? Maybe. But when I look back, I carry more happiness than sadness, more steadiness than shakiness. I survived. I evolved. I made it here.

So my advice to younger me would not be a warning or a lecture. It would simply be this…

Keep going. Don’t stop. Do what you truly believe is right. Listen for God in the quiet, hold tight to what you were taught, and trust that even the muddy road can lead to higher ground.

And here I am now.

There…..