Just a thought.

I heard this song on the radio sometime last week.
It was some Valentine contest thingy that people wrote to the radio station and the winner had Matthew West write a love song about their story.
Well, he picked a winner, but there was a second story that gripped his heart so much that he wrote a song for them too.
It was a military family story, you know, the typical, heart-wrenching thing that makes you want to change the station before you cry but you are somehow intrigued enough to keep the station set and fight the emotion.
A thought really hit me that I've never really truly thought about before.
I had the thought about the imagery the song painted depicting the fact that the dad missed so much of his kids life.
You can't get that time back.
You're kids only grow up once
And now, here he is facing retirement, love is finally coming home...
...now what?
your life is mostly over.

I only get one childhood, and I have been blessed with one filled with great memories.
I only get one set of teenage years
I'm only a young adult once.
I'll only get married once
If I have kids, they'll only have one childhood...
...and so on.
You only have one chance at this.
There will never be another February 17, 2011.
Ever.

I can't really wrap my head around it.
In a sense, it seems like childhood, teenage years, young adult-ness never ends
Because we can always bring the memories back to the front of our minds
We can look at pictures, tell stories with friends, think about it all we want
But the truth is, it's over.
You can never get it back.

Last night I found myself at some friends house that I haven't seen in a while.
Like, at least a year.
So, we were sitting there, catching up on life, when I just kinda sat back and realized who I was with, where we used to be, where we are now and where we are going.
It's a funny thing.
One of them I grew up with. I've known him since I can remember. He is one of the few people I can go back on all those old, great memories from when my age was in the single digits.
The other one I met at Bible school. When we met each other, we had wrong impressions, and didn't really like each other, but as the year went on, we actually became really great friends and realized that we are very similar.
So, here I sat, with blast-from-the-past friend I used to crush hard on when I was 7, and his wife who was there for a pretty difficult part of my life.
I'm pretty sure we used to sit back as kids and wonder where our lives would take us
And here we were, with the answers.

We're adults.
When did we get here?