at 31

I asked Sam the other day who the “child” was who was rolling hose at the fire station. Apparently that child was 23 and has already gone through medic school—older than I was when Sam got hired. Did I look that young, once?

I spend a fair amount of my time with people older than myself, but none of them has mentioned the weirdness of being a business owner in a networking group run by fellow 1990s-born peers, of taking your kids to a pediatrician younger than yourself, of realizing your husband is now the senior person on his shift when just the other day you were the newlyweds and newly-hireds meeting the veteran lieutenant for the first time.

And then Charlie Kirk was murdered.

Thirty-one years old.

Parent of two.

This is life now in the middle place, not young, not yet old: watching faces fade out of family photographs one by one, watching your baby morph into a toddler and then into a kid, every day feeling like you’re meeting someone new and losing someone old. Childish romanticization of young death gives way to a desperate prayer that God will have mercy on your family for another day, that the inevitable shattering loss will stay its hand for just one more hour of the present tranquility.

Time pulls like a riptide, and perhaps the lesson is that the harder you resist, the more likely you drown. Breathe. Don’t try to swim to shore. The waves will always win.

He was 31. So am I.

He was a parent of two. So am I.

He was mortal, fragile, always just one breath away from God taking His breath back. So am I.

At 31, a Levite man might have been a priest for a year. At 31, Jesus was one-third of the way through His ministry and two years away from death. At 31, my husband had already been bereaved of his mother; at 31, my mom became pregnant with me; at 31, my cousin Megan had just one year left to live.

In this state we live and endure, somewhere between certain death and eternal life, between paralyzed fear and a frenzied sprint, not young anymore but not quite old. Like wildflowers doggedly fighting for survival, we stay productive and pretty and try to forget that it’s all because we know winter is coming and we are going to die.

We don’t know when. But we can sense the angle of the sun is changing.

I hope you're happy

Have you seen those “I met my younger self for coffee” reels? They’re based off a poem by Jennae Cecilia, from her book Deep In My Feels, but they kind of took on a life of their own a few weeks ago, as viral trends do. I didn’t make one, but I saw them from nearly every influencer, brand, or business owner in my feed. In all the ones I saw, the predictable pattern was an older, wiser, less anxious “self” showing up to comfort a scattered and scared younger one, who was eminently grateful for the hug, tears, and pep talk.

The question that kept popping into mind for me was, “Doesn’t anyone have a younger self who is disappointed in what their future self has become?” (Or am I the only one whose younger self was a jerk?)

If I met my 21-year-old self for coffee today, she’d be so uncomfortable I think she’d clam up and refuse to speak to me, or—more likely—nod along with me agreeably while inwardly screaming “ARE YOU TELLING ME WE TURNED INTO A HERETIC?!”

I know her so well, but she doesn’t know me at all. She can’t fathom the changes wrought by heartbreak, sleep deprivation, or depression—the chipping away and continual molding of marriage, motherhood, and parenting. In her worldview there is no circumstance in which exiting her evangelical world and returning to liturgy makes sense; there is no universe in which questioning complementarian theology (let alone rejecting it) is anything short of a moral failure. There is certainly no space in her imagination for a day when she would contemplate the legitimacy of baptizing infants, chuckle a bit at the timeline of the end-times she drew in the back of her study Bible, or—God forbid!—sit in pews with people whose beliefs are varied and unknown to her, and haven’t been screened out by a lengthy “statement of faith” on the church website.

If she found out she would one day be the topic of concerned whispers by the elder board or disappointed remarks by mentors and friends, I think she’d have crawled into a hole and died (maybe after shaking me violently and screaming “HOW DARE YOU TURN INTO THIS?! HOW DARE YOU RUIN MY LIFE?!”).

But I hope she would be able to find, somewhere inside, the piece of her that was always there—compassionate and thoughtful and not-quite-a-clean-fit to the world she was trying so hard to fit into. I hope, like Glinda at the end of Wicked, she’d find some capacity to say, “I hope you’re happy”—even if she couldn’t imagine following me off the ledge.

Because that’s what I’d say to her. I don’t want to scold her, or rush her, or talk down to her about her narrow thinking and fear of the opinions of others. There’s so much life in between, so much of God’s slow and patient cultivation. If I spook her now I could interrupt it all.

So—I do. I hope she’s happy. I know she was, in many ways. But I know now there’s a certain depth of flavor missing from happiness when it hasn’t yet been seasoned with sorrow.

I wish I could tell her not to be afraid when things change, life hurts, and people hurt most of all. I wish I could tell her not to flinch when she hears the voices saying, “Look at her! She’s wicked! Get her!” But I can’t, she’s not ready. I’m not even ready—I still flinch at the thought of the labels they’d give me now.

All I can do is reassure her that the road she’s on still leads to Jesus, even if it’s lonelier sometimes. Her delight in the Scriptures and desire to share their wisdom with others won’t change, and in fact will only expand and deepen as she follows the guidance of the Spirit. The God she has known since childhood will prove Himself changeless and trustworthy, and He will provide gifts of reassurance that He is not simply waiting on high for her to screw something up—that His character is always to have mercy.

And I’d try to tell her that she’ll find God only gets bigger and more beautiful the more she explores Him and gazes upon Him—even when the path that leads “further up and further in” makes some turns she won’t see coming, some risks she doesn’t quite want to take but also can’t resist. She will taste freedom and never want to go back.

So, to my 21-year-old self, the one who would be deeply disappointed in me: I hope you’re happy, my friend.

I know I am.

truth and beauty

I wish I had music in my soul. It seems easier to put voice to it all that way, to put the hard unbeautiful words into some beautiful form that goes down easier. You can say more while saying less and the critics are too busy nitpicking the sound to go hard against the lyrics.

Plain words in a plain paragraph form, like this, leave nowhere to hide. I tell you what I think and wait to be torn to shreds for it. I write prose for the same reason people write poetry, but without the poetic form to excuse my emotion as “art.” Mine will be dismissed as the emotions of a weak vessel, but if this were a song the emotions would be considered its life force.

The feelings are allowed in art.

No wonder art has lost its place in church.

There’s at least some small exodus from Evangelicalism, Inc., with its warehouse buildings and windowless sanctuaries, back into traditions that lean into rhyme, rhythm, color, and beauty along with the truth. To my surprise, I have joined it.

If you follow my life in a timeline of the churches I’ve been part of, you’ll find that I followed the light: from four different windowless warehouses with bare walls to migrating into the well-lit foyer to, finally, sitting down every week in a cozy former synagogue with tall windows down each side, sunlight pouring generously in. There are small reproduced paintings in between the window frames depicting various Biblical scenes, and colorful banners hang on the walls. The altar is draped in rich fabric according to the liturgical season. Candles flicker. It’s humble, and it’s beautiful.

The feelings are allowed in beauty.

Truth and beauty are two of my highest values, but they’ve always felt at odds with each other. In this culture, we use phrases like “the awful truth” or “the ugly truth”—the thing nobody wants to hear, but somebody has to be brave enough to say. Those who offend with the truth get recognition. For several years, I tried this tactic on for size in my own writing, and it worked; it got a lot of comments and shares and traffic. It felt like I was doing something that mattered.

But it was ugly. Marked by pride, flattery, ego, and conflict. Even if everything I wrote was true, very little of it was honest.

Honesty is where truth and beauty find overlap.

The feelings are allowed in honesty.

In the realm of Christianity I’ve spent the most time in, there is this unspoken idea that the only really-true truth is the one that has been stripped of every element of life. “Real” truth, Truth with a capital T, should sound like a mathematical fact or a scientific law: black and white and unarguable and entirely dismissive of complicating factors like God or relationship or humanity.

Any emotion or soul or spirit—even the Holy Spirit Himself—renders a truth-claim suspect.

It’s idiotic, really. We were made human, in the image of God, only to attempt to become robots in how we discern what is true. We’ve made a sort of idol out of certainty—out of being able to believe a “fact” simply because “God said so,” without regard for the creative evidence both within us and without us that screams our facts are at best incomplete. Our truth is not honest.

If we are honest, humans were created for beauty. Humans are wired for emotions. Humans thrive in relationship. If we’re honest, relationships and emotions are some of the messiest and grayest areas of life. You can’t slap a mathematical fact or a scientific law on any of it. It’s just too unpredictable.

To me, that’s why it’s beautiful.

It’s a glimpse of God at work—glorious, fierce, incomprehensible. It’s a reminder that I am not in control and I don’t get to tell Him who He is. It’s walking under the trees in a whipping wind while the sky roils with thunderheads, or lying in the grass with the sun on your face and the thin buzz of honeybees all around. It’s the familiar rhythm of spring rolling into summer or the phases of the moon, punctuated by the chaos of invisible solar storms or devastating natural disasters.

There is order and there is chaos. There is truth and there is beauty. There is body and there is emotion. There is what we know and a whole universe of what we don’t know at all.

Honesty—the space where truth and beauty overlap—is what I see at the heart of the exodus from warehouse to window-light. I, for one, am worn out by robotic certainty and “the ugly truth,” because I know that the honest truth, the truth that holds space for the divine as well as the human, is beautiful.

God is beautiful and the maker of beauty. God is true and the standard of truth. My job, as His image-bearer and witness, is honesty.