When all my friends were going off to college or internships, I was the one who stayed in our hometown. I remember feeling so alone, making new friends because all my besties were gone.
By the time my friends moved back and started their careers, I’d had cancer and left mine. I worked a bunch of jobs, then moved away and back again.
When my friends had kids, I got a camper van. Two years later, I drove off in it.
Life goes by and then it’s done. You don’t get to live your twenties twice. I know a lot of people tell you to get married and have kids, and that’s a wonderful thing. I hope to do it someday. But please for the love of God and your future kids – having seen many marriages start and end – don’t get married because you think that’s the key to happiness. The key to happiness is found in dying to yourself and how you think your life should go. This can come through marriage, absolutely, but that’s not the story I’m living so I can’t speak to that.
There is no happiness in control. Even when you check all your self-determined boxes, you’ll still have a gnawing feeling inside that you missed it, because a life built on sand feels like that. And our culture thrives on distraction, anything to help us ignore the sense that we’ve lost the plot.
God is not a principle to follow but a person to be known.
And when you let God take your life apart and put it back together His way, there’s a permanent kind of confident contentment that sets in, where you know you can handle anything because you’ve watched God rebuild your life on Him, the only strong foundation. You’ve felt every breaking moment it’s taken to become more like the One who died for you. This can happen in marriage, singleness, singleness after marriage… in any season, IF you give Him such access to your heart. You don’t have to suffer to get to this place, but you probably will, because suffering is often the catalyst to waking up to your need for the kind of divine that is only found in Jesus.
Let Him have your life. All of it. You don’t even know if you’ll wake up tomorrow. What are you holding onto but an illusion? Give your life to Jesus and let Him rebuild it. You’ll get destroyed in the process, but you’ll choose it over and over, because every time you do, you become more Real, less of a fraud, more of a person of substance, not changing with the wind. You’ll feel His love the way you heard other people talk about it. You’ll get it, why people would die for this, because you have, in your way, a thousand times, and know you will again. And every time you do, He resurrects you into a person more full of Him, which means more loving (which will look very different than modern culture’s soppy definition and more like telling someone the truth when lies are killing them, even if they hate you because of it), more forgiving, and more willing to ask for forgiveness.
I can’t tell my story without talking about Jesus because He IS the story, He IS the song, and even if I sing about men and other mythical creatures, it’s all, always going to come back to Him. He saved my life too many times to count, He’s the stability of my soul, He’s the one pushing me forward – how could anything else hold my attention?
I’m not there yet. I’m not perfected, I can be moody, I’m not happy all or even most of the time, because an upward path is hard and I’m learning to expand my threshold for stress and frustration. But I’m moving forward on what I have, which is peace, and I sleep every night like a child worn out from too much playing in the sun. That’s enough to go on.