on approaching thirty

Before graduating from highschool, I had to write a paper outlining my plans for the next decade. Here's what I had in mind at seventeen:

"After I receive my {college} diploma, I will buy an old VW bus, fix it up and put stained glass windows on the sides, and drive across America for one year...

I will fly across the ocean and backpack across Europe for a year, staying in youth hostels. Since I'll be on that side of the ocean, I'll spend a year or two doing graduate work at Oxford. Then I'll return to my homeland and meet up with my compatriots Anna and Mollie in Chicago, where we'll share an apartment and I'll finish my graduate work at the University of Chicago. If I marry, I'll do it in Chicago. After a few years there, I'll settle in New England and open a bookstore/teashop modeled on Shakespeare and Co. in Paris. The shop will become the new haven for young writers, and while there I will write my Pulitzer Prize winning novel. Because of my fame, the local college will ask me to teach one honors writing class, which I will gladly do. Some of the students in that class (some may be my own children) will graduate and take over my shop when, around the age of forty-eight, I will sell all of my worldly possessions and move to Africa or South or Central America and spend the rest of my days a barefoot missionary."


Let's just pause for a minute to consider my hubris. Alright. Moving on.


The rest of the paper went on to admit that I couldn't possibly know what my future would hold, but that I expected in whatever it held, I would be called to "walk in a manner worthy of the Lord" (Col. 1:10).

Although I admitted that God controlled the future, not me, I still knew what I wanted. Adventure, exploration, freedom, and grand success in academic and literary and business endeavors. Marriage and motherhood were, at most, peripheral to my plan.

I'm sure that if you had told me at seventeen that thirty would find me a stay at home mom of two small kids in a painfully small midwestern town, I would have grimaced.

Here's how it happened. I took college to be a time for ideas and learning and personal growth, not a time for preparing for a career. Whoops. After college, I spent two years teaching English in Southeast Asia and earning an MA from Wheaton. (Teaching was a career, incidentally, that I had ruled out at the age of eleven, when I decided that getting attached to a class of kids every year and then saying goodbye to them every year would be too emotionally draining. It turns out that it is sad, but the truth is there are a fair amount of students you are happy to say goodbye to at the end of a year, too.) And then a year hanging out with the love of my life in southern California (and teaching some English). We married, and spend a year in Arkansas (still teaching English), and three years in Seattle, living in community with international students (and, yes, teaching English). We had a baby, and moved to Indiana, and had another baby, and now here I am. Five years under my belt in a career I never intended to have, and two babies underfoot, living in a town that covers less than four square miles of land.




A few years ago I read the memoir "Leaving Church," by Barbara Brown Taylor. I copied down these sentences:

"You only need to lose track of who you are, or who you thought you were supposed to be, so that you end up lying flat on the dirt floor basement of your heart. Do this, Jesus says, and you will live."

This was, as I recall, part of her commentary on Matthew 16:25, and it rang true to me.

It rang true because in 2004, after being sure that I was supposed to be in Vietnam, I was placed in Cambodia, and spent much of the year lying flat on the dirt floor basement of my heart.

It rang true because when we moved to Seattle, I worked in a coffee shop for a while, and to get there every day I walked past the majestic University of Washington, thinking about how for a while I thought I was supposed to be Dr. Lepine, university professor.

It rings true now, because although I love my specific and concrete life here, with my two kids and my husband, in the abstract it's not a life I would have chosen; it's not who I ever "thought I was supposed to be". And because when I am alone in the house with two kids both crying their heads off, or when I am up for the fourth time in the pitch black early morning hours, in the longest shortest time, in those moments I am lying flat on the dirt floor basement of my heart.

But I'm here to learn a lot of things. Maybe I'm learning some humility, how to lose my life and find it, and how to "make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands." Maybe I'm learning how to recognize God in the quotidian mysteries, in the Benedictine rhythms of motherhood
. Maybe I'm joining in the creative nature of God by creating babies and veggie stir-fry and quilts, by telling stories and painting with watercolors and making up silly songs and dances. Maybe I am making all things new by doing loads of laundry and getting dirty dishes to sparkle again. In each of these tasks, I'm - hopefully - participating in God's plan to bring restoration to a broken world.

As Barbara Brown Taylor wrote in her most recent book, "To lie flat on the ground with the breath knocked out of you is to find a solid resting place" and "While none of these displacements was pleasant at first, I would not give a single one of them back. I have found things while I was lost that I might never have discovered if I had stayed on the path."

When I was seventeen I knew what I wanted, but I admitted that I couldn't know what the future held for me. What I really meant by that was, "I don't know what will happen in the future, but I am pretty sure that I will be awesome in it."

I ended up somewhere entirely different than I anticipated, but, most of the time, I love it here.

Now, when I picture myself in the future, I don't even really know what I want. Now, When I confess that the future is uncertain, I think what I mean is that some of the time, maybe most of the time, I am able to trust God with the future, and able to believe that he will transform me in it.

But I still can't believe that I'm almost thirty.