“Searching is half the fun: life is much more manageable when thought of as a scavenger hunt as opposed to a surprise party.” —Jimmy Buffett

In each person’s life, our defining moments become road signs directing us towards a predetermined destination. Sometimes, our roads are straight and narrow. Sometimes we’re in such a hurry that we blow past the road sign and make wrong turn after after wrong turn ending up lifetimes away from our destination without even knowing it… And sometimes, if we’re lucky, we make a right turn on a lazy Tuesday afternoon, and end up right back where we started… staring right in the face of the road sign that we missed so many years earlier.

So here’s to second chances. And roads that lead us back around.

“Opportunities don’t often come along. So when they do, you have to grab them.” —Audrey Hepburn

The truth is, there is no line. There’s only your life, how you mess it up, and who is there to save you. Or who isn’t. —Mitch Albom

Refuge: A safe place. Safety.

I knew entering into 2010 it was going to be a rebuilding year. As I approached my 25th birthday, I wanted to start putting pieces together and lay groundwork for years to come. Even though I am only five months in to 2010, I have learned more about life in these five months than the five years prior to it.

The first lesson learned is  strategic life plans tend to backfire.  And then we find ourselves in a places so toxic that our only choice is to hold our breath, cross our fingers and take a leap hoping that by the grace of God we land in a safe place.  In those moments right before we leap, where we feel like our whole world is crashing down at our feet and we’re too scared to move forward but too smart to go backward ,  God gives us a push and off we go… scared to death but knowing full well that when we land we’ll finally be able to breathe again.

And then we land.

Sometimes at the feet of our parents. Our siblings. Our extended family. Our close friends. And sometimes, the people and places where we find refuge, are the last places we’d expect to find it. That’s the second and most important lesson that I’ve learned in 2010. There’s a country song by Trace Adkins that annoyed me to death when it was popular. “You find out who your friends are…” never seemed like it had much relevance in my life. I knew exactly who my friends are. Who I could trust. Who I couldn’t trust. I didn’t need some kind of crisis to tell me that.

I could not have been more wrong. In fact, I had no idea who my friends are.

And as 2010 brought so much needed change and so many important lessons, it also brought with it tremendous amounts of pain caused by people I would’ve taken a bullet for months earlier. As piles of lies and half-truths and behind-your-backs unraveled right before my eyes, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have moments where I felt like things would never be right again. But God has a sense of humor, and in every desperate moment when I felt truly hopeless, I landed right at the feet of unlikely refuge.

I was having a particularly bad day at a serving job that I hated, when my phone vibrated in my pocket. An old flame, someone that up until that moment left a bad taste in my mouth commented on my facebook status making me crack a smile for the first time that day. I commented back, and then he sent me a text message. We spent the next few weeks sharing our horror stories of 2010, checking up on a each other, and occasionally hanging out, giving me a chance to get out of Washington for a few hours when I felt like I was losing my mind.  He had broken my heart years earlier, and we went through phases of being friends, being booty calls, and being strangers. But on that idle Thursday afternoon, he was my saving grace. The one thing I needed to “just keep swimming”. He gave me the kick in the ass I needed to quit that stupid job that did nothing but add to my misery, he made me feel human, alive… even pretty again. He reminded me that things are never what they seem on the surface, and that I was better than all the things that were going on around me. And he did it without even trying.

He wasn’t the only person to look down and find me at their feet. Two 50 year old gay men at Brother’s Pizza have saved me from drowning in my own quarter-life crisis a time or two. So did a friend I haven’t seen in years by offering me a place to stay in Chicago when she noticed my status’ on Facebook to be particularly gloomy. A booty-call I met on craigslist has been a constant source of love and support, and is truly one of the best friends I’ve ever had. We’ve helped each other through countless struggles. The annoying country song was right. When things go wrong, you find out who your friends are. And every time I stumble or take a leap of faith I am surprised by who I see when I look up.

So many people think of everything in black and white.  Take a look around the next time your whole world comes crashing down at your feet. I bet you’ll find solace in the gray area. In places where you’d least expect a soft landing. And for those soft landings, I am eternally grateful.