My senior year of high school, I remember attending a banquet and hearing a speech by a successful woman who used to live in my small town. She had risen through the ranks in her job (something in finance) but was also a mother and a wife and a goldendoodle owner and a Costco Executive member. “I’m here to say: you CAN have it all!” she exclaimed, rather Oprah-like, her voice echoing off the walls of the cafeteria.
The “yous” she spoke to was a group of public high school teens from a class where 10% of the grade was either pregnant or had impregnated someone, and another 10% failed out before receiving their diploma. Some of us would be going to college, and some of us would be joining the military, and some of us would be honoring the terms of our probation. But all of us were on the threshold of adulthood, hoping that maybe this woman with the goldendoodle was right — that maybe the doors of life would open to us, and behind them, we’d discover that we could have it all.
I remember having a conversation with my parents after the banquet about how the speaker’s sentiment felt … off. For one, the statistics weren’t really stacked in my classmates’ favor. The reality was that very few of us in that room would ascend to such success that we would go on to be touted as an example for teenagers to aspire toward. There were real limits to the lives many of my peers had already lived or would continue to live. Children, debt, addiction: some were saddled with these responsibilities all before they even turned eighteen. And the ones that were not … well, we were rather ordinary individuals from a rather ordinary place.
Sociological considerations aside, my teenage self also felt suspicious toward anyone in a pantsuit telling me you can have it all. I thought pantsuits looked rather restrictive — requiring a kind of conformity I wasn’t sure I was well suited for. Her speech felt a bit like a sales pitch for a product I didn’t really want to buy. I wondered if she really believed it: did she actually think she had it all? Did she actually believe we, a group of teenagers with middling talent and a slight Pittsburgh accent, could have it all, too? And really, if we wanted to get philosophical, what was “it” anyway?
Was it:
- A career that pays well with time off to go to your beach rental in Hilton Head?
- A house with granite countertops and a pool full of chemicals and a backyard with dying grass spots where your goldendoodle peed?
- Being a girlboss (but missing the game, the band concert, the orthodontist appointment)?
- Motherhood on your preferred timeline?
- Having the exact number of kids you wanted?
- A body that “bounces back” from birth?
- Marriage to the person you loved when you were 22?
- Liberation from the person you loved when you were 22?
- Homeschooling, homesteading, homemaking?
- Confidence without cracks, belief without doubt, faith without frustration?
- All of the above?
Was this elusive, ethereal it even what I wanted? What God wanted? I wasn’t so sure. And so I decided I’d try to figure it out.
I think it’s fair to say that I spent the majority of twenties trying to find the elusive “it.” I switched college majors three times. I had five different jobs in five years. I moved to three different cities. I tried new churches, traveled a lot, downloaded Hinge, deleted Hinge, shot my shot and got shot down, laughed in the face of rejection … and cried privately about it later. I applied for two different grad school programs and didn’t go to either. I trained for marathons, went to therapy, started saving for retirement. I served in my church, kept a regular prayer journal, wrote essays about my faith. I hoped this kind of life — one of doing it all — would yield fruit.
I was a huge dreamer in my twenties — brimming with big plans and hopes and ideas and so full of energy to execute them. Living this way was exciting and energizing … until it wasn’t. I spent the latter half of my twenties cycling in and out of burnout that manifested physically, emotionally, and spiritually. In my final months of being 29, I chased my running goals so hard that I literally broke a bone in my back and had to withdraw from my dream race (the Boston Marathon) which was run on my 30th birthday.
It was a painful way to start a new decade. And ultimately, a healing one.
My thirties began with a literal breakdown in my body — a physical sign of an inward reality that something had to give. That “something” was my determination to craft my life into the shape I wanted it to be; I had to give it up. I had to shift my values, change how I spent my time, and rethink my plans and priorities. And perhaps most of all, I had to reckon with the reality that I had been living as a loyal disciple of the prosperity gospel.
The prosperity gospel is a lot more pervasive (and persuasive) than I think most of us would care to admit or even realize. We find it distasteful coming from a well-dressed man in a pulpit on a Sunday, but I know I certainly have hoped that my faithfulness to Do It All For God™ would yield the kind of life I hoped for. We don’t want our best-laid plans to fail — to see our dreams evaporate into ecclesiastical vapors. What we want is to have it all … because we believe we deserve it. Being the well-dressed (wo)man looks rather appealing when you feel as if you’ve been perpetually outfitted in sackcloth and ashes.
Life is fleeting, like a passing mist. It is like trying to catch hold of a breath; All vanishes like a vapor; everything is a great vanity. (Eccl 1:2)
However, the Bible does not promise faithful followers of Jesus that they will go on to have a fulfilling career path or a frictionless faith or a blissful marriage that produces well-behaved children. That message aligns more with the prosperity gospel than the actual gospel. The actual gospel tells followers of Christ that they will be reviled and persecuted on his account and that their reward will not come until they die. The actual gospel shows Jesus Christ hanging on a cross with a criminal to his right and his left, both who deserve the bitter sponge of condemnation but are offered the sweet cup of absolution. The actual gospel isn’t really fair.
When things are not falling in our favor, it can be very hard to accept that life with Christ is not fair. At times, this can feel like a real injustice. But what sobers me is remembering that circumstances are not salvific. Only Jesus is salvific.
Let me say that again: only Jesus saves.
Is Jesus actually enough for me? I suppose this is the question I was actually trying to answer the majority of twenties.
Trying to find the elusive “it” was just another way of trying to save my life, or at least, save it to what I wanted it to be. But that plan didn’t work out. So many of my plans didn’t work out. And here on the other side of that, in another summer where so many plans didn’t work out, I truly and heartily believe that there is mercy in seeing our plans fall apart. Why? Because this is where the peace and power of God and the companionship and comfort of Christ shines most brightly.
I like how Tish Harrison Warren puts it in her book What Grows in Weary Lands:
We must accept the circumstances of today — perhaps especially those we wouldn’t have chosen — as the place of our formation. Staying in our cell is to meet God not in the how our life could be or should be, but in what it actually is, today, in this moment. Grace finds us, only ever, in the present tense. (p. 57)
I also think about what Paul writes in his letter to Timothy (1 Tim 1:12–17). It could be said that Saul of Tarsus had it all; he had the coveted standing and safeguards of Roman citizenship. He had access to power and authority to exercise that power, too. He was a man who was respected in society. But Paul tells Timothy he was a “blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man.” By all accounts, Paul should have been smitten by God. But instead, Paul isn’t treated fairly. He says, “I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief. The grace of our Lord was poured out on me abundantly, along with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus” (1 Tim 1:14).
Paul’s conversion is an example of both the corrective and the comforting mercy of Christ. God’s mercy both humbles us to acknowledge our utter lack, and it uplifts us to acknowledge God’s utter abundance. Christ’s “immense patience” (1 Tim 1:16) is always given freely, never earned or awarded to the highest and holiest bidder. Mercy is the opposite of the prosperity gospel; it is a ledger so in the red, and a savior whose blood settles the whole debt.
I believe one of the hardest parts of my adulthood has been reckoning with the reality that I so frequently would prefer to reject mercy. I see this both in my relationships with other people — my first instinct is one of indignance — but also in my relationship with God. With God, I have not always believed that his grace is actually enough. I have had a scarcity mindset that has, at times, led to deep skepticism and distrust and robbed me of gratitude and, honestly, joy.
In that vein, I do not mourn how I spent my time in my twenties. What I mourn is how much of that time I spent wondering what I had to do to feel worthy of love. I spent a lot of time worrying that maybe if I was just prettier, just thinner, just quieter, just smarter, just less-of-me-and-more-of-someone-better that, in time, I would finally be able to have it all. I was poisoning myself with the potion of prosperity when the cup of life was being lifted to my lips.
But God, in his mercy, corrected me. His correction wasn’t coercive, wasn’t scolding, wasn’t filled with accusations or irritation. Instead, his correction was personal, relational, tactile, generative. I saw this so clearly last summer, when I got to spend five weeks living in Ireland and attending a culinary school set on the coast of the Celtic Sea. The experience felt like living in the poetry of the Psalms. “You have set my feet in a spacious place,” David writes in Psalm 31. “But I trust in you, Lord; I say, ‘You are my God.’ My times are in your hands.”
My time has always been in God’s hands. Fortunately, the scales mercifully fell from my eyes and I could finally see it: I was never cut off from God’s sight.
The life I have been given is so saturated with God’s grace. Every story I tell drips with it.
I do not think I would have gone to Ireland had I gotten married and had kids in my twenties. Had I gone to seminary. Had I found a different job, had different colleagues, had I moved to New York City or somewhere else exciting. I would not have my upstairs apartment to host weary women who need a break, who need someone to take care of them for a moment, who need the ministry of a good chocolate chip cookie. I would not be writing here about the things I do. I would not have the same tender places in my heart that sometimes hurt but also allow me the ability to empathize with the walking wounded.
By the world’s standards, I do not have it all, and yet, I am enveloped in mercy. It’s from this place that I have started to let God reshape and redeem my imagination. I have begun to believe that God’s mercy can be found here: in the place I called scarce but I can actually see is abundant.
I have started to see how the life I have and the words I share from it might be able to be used as an encouragement to others. I wonder what conversations I could have with other young adults who were like me — and what testimonies or prayers I might be able to offer them as they encounter their own existential doubts and dilemmas.
I have wondered what stories I will get to live and what essays I will get to write about them. Serious pieces and funny ones: what a privilege it is to share hope and humor! Comedy is a mission field, I believe; I’d like to be one of its missionaries.
I have started to accept that if I will experience marriage and motherhood, it will look different than my peers, and that could be beautiful, too. I’ve considered what joy might be found around my kitchen table in my elder years, and who will sit there. Family, friends, poets, priests, singers, strangers, rebels, rule followers — who will I serve with my wrinkled hands? I dream of the menu: a roast chicken with herbs I grew in my garden, a bright green salad, focaccia that rose in the sunlight of my kitchen window sill, warm chocolate chip cookies, good wine.
I’ve started to pray for patience in the passage of time. I have asked God to help me trust that his grace will not be overshadowed by my grief. I have asked him not to make me rich in money or success or power but in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
I do not know what my future looks like, but I am not resigned to a grayscale life. Life in Christ is painted with the vibrant colors of the gospel.
And mercifully, that’s what it means to have it all.
this article is very comforting and encouraging, thanks for sharing