I turned twenty this past week. That’s right Dad, twenty.
With no longer a ‘teen’ at the end of my age, it seems right to reflect on what I’ve learned about this stage of growing up.
Something about stepping into young adulthood is painful.
It’s the growing pains of realizing that maybe the world isn’t the way you thought, and neither are people, God, or yourself. It’s a space of discovery. It’s a time when you find out who you are and what your calling is, which in turn radically shakes your life. After all, the 12 disciples were young adults- and for three years they were purified of their old lives and pushed into their destinies by the command that they were created to live for more. Since the age of seventeen, the Lord has been shaking my foundations and rewiring the ways I see Him, others, and myself.
As a child I dreamed of the days that I would be older, each imagination filled with faith of becoming a confident and capable young woman fulfilling what she was destined to do. In the ignorance of childhood, my daydreams didn’t predict the hardship that comes with change. Before what’s given by God can be planted, what isn’t meant for keeping must be uprooted. I didn’t think on what pain it is to be remade until it was happening to me. In the hands of God, I have felt what is to be kneaded like clay. For three years, I’ve been in a place of steady renewal. Each new change The Lord taking away a rock I held that would only make me sink to replace it with jewel for the crown upon my head. It’s been a journey of loss and redemption, losing what I thought I wanted, to be given above all else what I needed to be restored in full. It’s a story of God bringing light to the damaged, dark places inside, transforming areas where the softness of my heart had become calloused by the damage of repressed heartache.
Something about stepping into young adulthood is painful.
It’s also incredibly wonderful- to finally know for certain that things don’t have to be the way they’ve always been. Although God never changes, He will change you a million times, chipping away at all that doesn’t look like who you really are, fulfilling the promise of 2nd Corinthians 3:18 that we move from one degree of glory to the next.
In the shaking, pieces of my heart that still claim ‘orphaned’ are being uncovered by a patient Father’s unending grace. Although it’s good to abandon false philosophies uncovered by truth, it does hurt to be shaken. Still, the pain has purpose-
“This phrase, ‘Yet once more’ indicates the removal of all things that are shaken- that is, things that have been made- in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.” -Hebrews 12:26-28
It seems there are parts of us that are divine- a kingdom DNA all our own, an identity given by the Maker of Heaven. Then there are parts of us that are man-made, a tapestry of false philosophy and an orphaned heart.
The kingdom inside of us cannot be shaken.
The growing pain of young adulthood is the shaking of all else that can.
On New Years Eve, the 40 other young adults I’m living with had the space to declare who they’re going to be this year. Gathered in a circle, we took turns standing up to proclaim over ourselves what we we’re going to choose. It is painful to be in this process of growing into who you’ll become, to be figuring out early adulthood. Still, it is the most empowering to know that the answers to the questions of who you are and what you’re meant to do will define what the world looks like after you’re out in it.
This is my declaration: I declare that I am a sister. My voice will not only minister to the hearts of daughters but of sons also, and my story is a platform for both men and women to find healing and reconciliation in the name of Christ Jesus.
Let the year of twenty become a foundation for a decade of confidence and capability, Amen.
