Turning 30 was hard for me this year.
This was not my plan for my life.
Now before you start lecturing me, I knew six years ago that I wasn’t going to be living my plans for my life. It was then, in my first apartment after college, that God said I had good dreams, but it was time for me to live His dreams instead of mine. So I’m good with that.
Sort of.
I expected to be married and have kids by 30. Call me crazy, it was just a thought I had. I expected to be walking or even running in whatever career or ministry God had for me…not one year in, still trying to find my balance. I expected to be using this degree that cost me six years of my life, which I have not seen fully utilized yet.
It hurt.
I hurt.
So having spent this last week witnessing God’s faithfulness and impeccable timing in the Bible, I am trying to let the trust in Him soak into my soul.
His faithfulness stands tall against my litany of mistrust and the tears pour slowly down.
This must be what repentance feels like.
Raindrops in the Ocean 
Feb 06, 2011 @ 00:05:47
Pinwheel remembers your dreams in all its hearts…some still above, and some now below the ground. We hold them safely, as dreams deserve to be held even when they may never come to pass in quite the way we imagined them. We hold with special tenderness the grief that goes with dreams that seem to come screeching to a halt, in that special place that will always be yours more than anyone else’s.
We, too, were a dream dreamed decades ago. How many years it took to understand that our dreams WERE God’s dreams for us, just His time is different than our small worldly time, so “tomorrow” for Him looked like decades to us…and His vision is so much clearer than ours. Have you ever seen someone standing by the road, and gotten there to discover it was really a post and a tree, yards apart from each other? We see through a glass darkly….
He struggles, too, with the limiting linearity of our world. Of course HE could have done a million other things while getting that degree–but we have to do things one (or maybe five) at a time. Yet He needs you to have it…it is one of the pieces in the puzzle box. By and by you will have them all, and He will give you the picture, and you will begin to see how it all goes together. Of course it will still not be easy!
We struggle to have faith in this as well, esp. now. But looking back at the signs and wonders of the past 15 years, when it started all coming together, gives confidence that this faith is sensible–to us, if not yet to others.
When tested, it is usually best to try to please God. He is more apt to remember (sorry we always forget the source of that wonderful quote).
Love and blessings,
Pinwheel
Feb 07, 2011 @ 01:21:25
You seem to be in a very similar place to mine.
You also seem to be handling it much better.
Next month I will turn forty. When I do, I will have a couple of weeks left to copy whatever I want to copy from the forums before it’s lost forever. I will remember knowing more and better things about what God made when I happened than I ever dared imagine. And it will hurt, because it sputtered out at some point before I could really start to own it as real. I look back at what I was and don’t even recognise it, or remember what it was like to be able to say some of the things I said and really believe them for myself as easily as I can for others.
Much has happened since then, but nothing gives me the courage to start dreaming again. There are too many defects and too many flaws. I am at my post, that’s all. I’m not angry about it anymore. I’m just here. It still hurts.