Ten years ago, I was walking across my college campus on a humid, golden-lit evening. My good friend, still stuck at age 19, asked how I felt about my birthday. I pulled in a deep breath and smiled. “I love it! I’m so excited not to be a teenager anymore.”

 Twenty was the age of promise, the next decade hinting at monumental moments like degrees and engagement rings, careers and new friendships, international travel. Experiences that happen for the first time only one time. 

During a childhood spent straining for independence, I imagined life on my own. As an adult, before the inevitable “settling down,” I would get a historic but appropriately renovated apartment in a big city’s downtown. I’d cook gourmet dinners with friends and afterwards sit on my balcony alone to watch city lights and read good literature. I’d have a real writing career, definitely a dog, and maybe a roommate depending on current inflation. 

I would be self-sufficient, confident, breezy but rooted, always learning, always growing. I would stop wearing basketball shorts and my sisters’ hand-me-down clothes and develop an actual sense of style. I might attempt heels and a matching purse.

Ten years later, this morning to be precise, I lugged a stroller out of my trunk while Texas heat sent rivulets of sweat down my spine. I wrestled to unfold the stroller, squashed my foot, bit my tongue, and then I saw it—across the parking lot—a beautifully appointed apartment building with shaded balconies, just enough room for a few plants and a comfortable chair. I thought of the dream—that life of cultivated independence in Downtown Far Away. 

I smiled faintly, opened the car door, and pulled 19-month-old Jack into my arms, his curly blonde head still smelling of sleep and baby shampoo. We walked to the playground and filled an empty tea canister with rocks, leaves, and twigs. I watched him brave the slide and motion “again” in his self-created sign language. 

I’m turning 30 and life is everything I hoped it would be and nothing like what I pictured. 

My greatest fear in life is this—to waste it. To lose my grasp on Time and allow it to slip through my fingers unhandled, unfelt, unexperienced. Life is short. I noticed that right away. In my earliest memory, I knew my father was dying. It was like a sad song humming in the background. Our house in the woods lived in a suspended state of waiting. Time ticking, drawing away like the sun disappearing behind the ridge. 

I’ve always felt certain about the reason I existed. Not certainty in an occupation, like Impressionist painter or pharmacist. God rarely gives us certainty in the details, but I believe he does in the essence. I knew that as a created being, I owed everything, absolutely everything, to the one who created me.

That knowledge has removed a great deal of fear from my life. My dreams and talents, while important and meaningful, are subsumed into a higher caller. They are extensions of me, not the essence of me. My accomplishments are elements in the journey, not the buried treasure.

I’ve failed so many times. Fallen short. Disappointed myself and others.  Live and learn, I say to myself a dozen times a day. 

The end game, the point, isn’t for me to forge a stellar career, earn a million dollars, or charm my way into a stable marriage. 

The point is to glorify God. To love him. And others.

I’m turning 30, and to be honest, it’s bittersweet. I can’t help but take a frank assessment of my fleeting existence. So, is this life? Am I doing it right?

Maybe I thought I’d have accomplished more. Been more. I dreamed of more children by now. Another book. I dreamed of happier, calmer lives for several people that I love.

But I’m hopeful, because I know that the light and shadow of my life, the good and the hard, the glorious and the terrible, merely foreshadow a greater story. If I was created and I owe everything to the Creator, I also believe that the greater story ends when goodness and joy triumph. And that unending state of reality will be beautiful.

Someday, God willing, Jack will be a 20-year-old bursting with newfound independence. A 30-year-old celebrating his accomplishments. A father wrestling a stroller. An old man taking a frank assessment.

And if I can convince him of anything, it will be this:

1) Embrace your calling. Not the calling for an occupation, but your calling as a created human to be compassionate, generous, patient, morally unflinching. Most of all, God-loving and people-loving.

2) Respect your mentors. Listen to their years of experience. Heed their warnings. Humble yourself under their correction. You don’t know much. Others know more.

Women like Dolly McClain, Betty Thorn, Sally Davis, and Kathryn Van Dyke changed my life through their stalwart grace under pressure. Most of these mentors are gone now, but I still hear their words.

3) Savor the good. Don’t miss out on the trees because you’re overwhelmed by the forest. Find beauty in the details—the smell of pine sap, the sound of your grandmother’s laugh, the taste of blueberries, the warmth of a summer wind. Let the ordinary be extraordinary. 

4) Don’t hide from the bad.  It isn’t our lot in life to avoid suffering, disappointment, or heartache. I don’t know exactly why. Sorrow arrives like cold in winter. We can’t see it, but we feel it. We observe its effects in the same way we observe frosted windows, icy roads, and frozen breath. 

We will not always understand, and that’s okay. The point of life isn’t to package our pain into shiny paper and come up with the why and the how and the reason. So much of life is enduring, trusting, even when we don’t understand. 

I’m turning 30, and as I stand on the threshold of another mystery-holding decade, I have questions. Sometimes I wish I could raise a hand and ask, “Could we rewind and take that in a different direction?” But to retrace time is not our destiny.

It doesn’t look like I’ll ever have a downtown apartment or a flair for fashion. I have one purse and it matches pretty much nothing. I have a pharmacy degree and a fledgling writing career and enough dreams to fill a spaceship. And I have no clue, honestly no clue, where exactly we go from here.

But I plan to pursue my calling as a created human-being. To give faithful love and friendship. To accept the good and the bad. To trust and endure even when I don’t understand. Somewhere between those lines, that’s the essence of life.