Twenty-Two
Twenty-two this year, with a few habits I’ve let go and a few I’m still clinging to. Things I thought would be gone by now: nail-biting, people pleasing, sometimes having an imaginative car-ride concert where I am singing backup for Taylor Swift, not missing a single “oh oh oh” because it's the same one I’ve been singing since Fifteen was released, and I was ten then and fifteen felt so far away, but now it’s even farther behind me than it once was ahead. When I was ten, twenty-two felt like the year I would have it all together. The year I would graduate college, get married, move out of my parents house and into my own, start my own job, maybe write a book, certainly have life all figured out.
And some of that will quite likely occur, while some of that I pray happens soon. But there’s something about twenty-two that feels like the walking in between: It’s the planning for a wedding but also calling my mom to ask whether styrofoam can be microwaved. It’s the buying a car but panicking when a check engine light comes on, finally feeling comfortable on 465-West but mostly because I know it’s the road that will bring me back to my parent’s house, and regardless of the multitude of endless lanes dotted with cars that cost more than five times my life savings, i know that eventually those lanes will morph into one, a country backroad lined with golden cornfields and half-barren branches. I’ll drive down that road a little faster than I should, now blaring 22, still singing back-up for Taylor Swift but still not feeling quite the age of the song. I’ll turn into the gravel driveway that I tearfully pulled out of on move-in day of my freshman year of college and I’ll praise the Lord that I can be twenty-two and still walking in between. I don’t have it all together. I’m not even close.
Twenty-two this year, with a tendency to still forget the pit I’ve been pulled from and fall short of finding fullness in my Father, but a remembrance of grace. A refreshment as I learn, with every new trip around the sun, what it looks like to be wholly sold out for Jesus. To sing back up for Taylor Swift but also to be willing to die for the sake of faith, to sacrifice my reputation for the spread of the gospel, to eagerly step from the bogs of infancy that tug on my heart to make this year (once again) all about me.
It’s nothing more than another sunup to sundown, but the neat thing about birthdays is they remind us we’re alive - still alive - and still have something worth living for. Only another year in the already-but-not-yet and yet there’s something tugging in my heart that prompts me to start making it matter. As I work to surrender nail-biting, people-pleasing, and probably not the Taylor Swift concerts, may I also surrender the self-centeredness that marked the teens and twenties that have come before. May this year be a year of grace, of growth, of grit, and of Godliness.
Twenty-two, I’m ready for you.