Shifting gears

So this happened!  Jay's first truck.  After sweating like a slave in a cotton field, Oh wait, that was Jay, sweating like an pig in a corn field this summer, detasseling.  All that hard work came to fruition last night when he was able to buy his first truck -with his mom and dad's help too!  Mike actually found the truck in Peru, IL.  It is a 2005 Ford F150 and Jay is in love.  Now he gets to stare at it for three more months until his 16th birthday.  The truck came in under budget, it's clean and no body rot.  It has some mileage though, 177,000, to be exact, but with extra tender loving care, we hope Jay can get another 100,000 out of it. 
All moms say they can't believe their children are the ages they are and I'm no different.  This morning Jay drove us to church in his truck and as we were driving the new song by Lee Brice, "Boy," came on.  Note to any mom out there, Do Not, I repeat, Do Not, listen to that song with your teenage son driving, especially when he's a hop, skip and a jump away from turning 16 and he's driving his first vehicle!  I think I might have bit a hole through my lip to keep from crying.  I figured that having an emotional breakdown before church might not send the best message and Mike would really question my mental stability.  I have really had to shift gears with Jay the last year.  He's turning into a man right before my very eyes.  I wasn't prepared for the changes I would have to make, although to be honest, Jay has been preparing me for them for years, I was just hoping I could ignore them and not have to actually implement them.  Often I look at my little family and I wonder where the years of walking around the block went, where the nightly baths went, the bedtime stories, hearing the boys yell "mom" and running to me as I walked in the door from work.  Those years were physically exhausting, but there's an element of mental exhaustion these days.  I don't spend a lot of time worrying but I do spend time wondering what my life will look like in 5 and 10 years.  I told Mike the other day that in 10 years (actually maybe even less than that) we will be right back to where we started, at the beginning, when it was just him and I.  I find myself thinking about my mom too.  She probably thought that also, but then when it was all said and done, she had to do life on her own as my dad had left.  Talk about shifting gears.  One thing I know is through my life I've had to shift gears on more than one occasion.  Life is a series of gear shifts.  It's all in how you adapt and handle those changes.  During these times I rely heavily on my faith.  In every season of my life God has been there.  He will lead me into this next season and prepare me for my upcoming series of shifting gears because ready or not, here they come!