Who Am I? - Part 2

The year I turned 22 (2002), the domino effect began. That was to be expected. Twenty-two, despite the rise of the average age of Americans getting married, is still the “age of passage” when it comes to getting married. When I was the tender age of eight, I had written into my life plan to get married at the age of 22. The problem? Well, I watched a lot dominoes fall over the next year…but I was not a piece of that effect.

Between 2002 and 2003, I spent more money on wedding presents, wedding showers, wedding ideas. I was very happy for my friends and their new spouses, but it was also very heart wrenching. One, the change in those friendships was often difficult. And, two, there wasn’t a knight in shining armor anywhere near my line of vision. No amount of hoping was going to bring him, either.

Thinking back now 17 years, it’s hard to remember clearly the thoughts that took up residence in my mind. But I do know I often asked myself who in the world am I? I honestly didn’t know then. To be single for the rest of my life was not a road I either wanted to dwell on or had any clue what it meant. The past ten years of my life certainly hadn’t prepared me to contemplate a life of singleness. ATI taught that, ultimately, a woman’s only purpose was to get married even though it also strongly discouraged it. On the flip side of that already two-edged sword, it did absolutely nothing to train or educate a young woman on what to do until (or if never) Prince Charming showed up. So, here I was at the age of 23 without a prince and no clue as to how to be productive. Thankfully, I was not alone.

A few years previous, upon moving to New Hampshire, the Lord started drawing me to Him in a myriad of ways. For the first time in my life, I knew God was real. I knew He loved me. I knew He was holy. I knew He was sovereign. I knew He heard me. And I was learning to “give a reason for the hope that lies within me” – a verse that had always left me confused and afraid. The path the Lord led me upon as I entered my twenties and started the painful march through them was not a path I would have ever chosen. It was a path of shattered dreams. It was a path of some of the deepest hurts I would ever face. It was a path of darkness. But there was forever a Light shining at my feet. Not enough to see anything, but enough to take one more step. And then another. And then another. Steps that often took me in surprising directions as I learned not just about myself but mostly about my God.

I think the world has an idea that the age of discovery and figuring out who we are and what we will be for the rest of our lives happens in our twenties. After all, that’s when we finish college, get “real” jobs, find our spouse, start a family and all the other “big decisions” that define who we are. But anyone who has survived their twenties will tell you that’s just silly. Even if the finishing college, real job, marriage, kids, mortgage, etc. does all come to fruition in your twenties you are far from sailing peacefully through your remaining decades. You could loose that job. Kids turn your life upside down. What if you have to move? Sorry.  There is simply no such thing as “smooth sailing”.

If anything, my twenties were a massive hurricane with the peaceful moments of brief passings through the eye of the storm. I watched some of my dearest friends get married and have kids. My brother graduated from high school and turned his back on his family. One job after the other fell to pieces through no real fault of my own. I tutored and spent the summers at a camp in North Carolina surrounded by idiotic college students who I came to love. My dearest friend and sister chose someone else and eloped. Allyson came into my life. I moved to Indiana because my family did and watched everything I had built in New Hampshire disappear over the horizon. And, finally, I left home and moved to Texas at the age of 29, no clue as to what that step was going to lead to. My twenties did not answer the question “Who am I?” They were simply a myriad of stepping stones along the path of life. Some wonderfully beautiful. Others deceptively slippery. All of them placed there by my loving and sovereign Heavenly Father.

I’m not saying my twenties didn’t have millions of moments of utter selfishness, wanting to know who I was, and what I was to do, and if that stupid Prince Charming was ever going to show or I could just discount that idea wholesale. So often I focused on that wrong question. That self-focused, prideful question. But not as much. Because God used those years and the stones He placed in my path as markers to look at Him. To see Him. To know Him. And to ask Him who He is. I can honestly say, I wouldn’t have survived my twenties without Him. Without His demanding that I look at Him. Not at me. At Him. And to realize that who I am, ultimately, is all about who He is.