On Turning 28

It feels like one of these late August sunsets. Today has been beautiful and warm, but tomorrow will be darker earlier and longer. All too soon it'll be that last good day of autumn before the winter settles in, cold and heavy as a snowdrift. 

It feels stupid that this is the metaphor I reach for as I approach my twenty-eighth birthday. I know I'm not really old. In fact, I am the youngest now I will ever be again. Technically, this is always true, but it feels more true as the calendar turns to a new year of my life, a year that places me officially in my late twenties.

People say that being in your thirties is amazing because you know who you are and you're comfortable in your own skin, but having lived here in this body my whole life, I feel quite at home in this interior world of mine. I am not sure I will feel better when the vitality of youth gives way to those decades of middle age that will leach the color from my hair and etch lines above my eyes that will make me look as I feel, which is to say permanently disgruntled and bewildered that I will not live forever young. 

I almost laughed a few months back when I came upon the Psalm that says, "O Lord, make me know my end and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting I am!" In these years of my mid-twenties, this reality has been pressed upon me with increasing weight. When I read the scene in Wendell Berry's novel Jayber Crow in which the eponymous protagonist strolls through the town graveyard, reflecting upon the many acquaintances who now populate it, I realized that the dear souls with whom I share my life will someday exit it, perhaps sooner than I might imagine. One by one they will desert me until I alone am left, and then I too will go. Though the particulars of these sufferings remain undisclosed, their certainty is absolute. And between now and then, who knows what other tragedies may befall what has been up till now a relatively charmed and happy life? 

These feelings intensified as my last birthday approached. I wrote at the time about watching a storm move across the sky and sensing that it was a metaphor for something, most likely some suffering I might endure. All year long as I watched for those clouds to manifest themselves, a strange, resolute sense of dread came over me. Perhaps this deep suffering would take place in my twenty-seventh year (it did not); perhaps it would wait many more years. But it would come nevertheless, and I possessed increasingly less conviction that the good things I hoped for would do the same. So much of my twenties has seen what I perceived as certain and constant dissolving before me. The people we love, the spaces we occupy, the positions we hold, the aspirations we seek to build–they may vanish in any moment. Ultimately, we can predict nothing of fate beyond death. 

The praxis of such a joyless philosophy is cynicism and fear–cynicism that little good lies ahead, fear that something bad is sure to happen. Yet, like a leashed dog, I had no choice but to continue forward into this unfriendly future. I could be dragged or I could allow myself to be led. So, each day I stepped into the present as though into a monsoon, determining to get through it but expecting to not particularly enjoy the process, especially since I could see nothing beyond the two feet in front of me.

As I trudged through the year, however, I continued a practice I began with my twenty-fourth birthday: memorizing my "birthday Psalm." That year, I memorized Psalm 24, then Psalms 25 and 26 the following years, and now Psalm 27. I already knew verse 1, and unbeknownst to me, I was living verse 13:

"I would have lost heart unless I had believed I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living."

That sense of trepidation that dogged me was not an honest reckoning with the reality of living in a fallen world, but rather a lack of faith in a God who has overcome it. It was not that I did not believe in God anymore or even that I was doubting whether He was good. I had simply slipped into a quiet and almost unconscious heresy: I cannot expect God's goodness in my life.

I would never have said this out loud, and if I had caught myself actively thinking it I would probably have recognized its error. But I was living as though it were true, and thus I was losing heart. Like the Preacher of Ecclesiastes, I had begun to look for only the vanity of life under the sun and not the God who imbues that life with abundance.

I knew how fleeting I was and anticipated the time of trouble, but I had forgotten the first Psalm I ever memorized, one of the most famous passages in all of Scripture at the end of Psalm 23: "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life."

Surely goodness. Surely mercy. It is not death and disaster that follow me as a child of God, but God's grace and kindness. Though in this life we suffer as we anticipate the glories of the life to come, that does not mean that nothing good awaits us between now and then. And certainly, we must wait for it, pray for it, and allow it to visit us in forms we never anticipated and at times for which we did not schedule it. But if we know God and walk with Him, we can be confident that He will either, as the late Tim Keller so eloquently put it, "give us what we ask or give us what we would have asked if we knew everything he knows.”

Perhaps it is true that, as I have feared, the tangible gifts I ask of God will never materialize, and I will be laden with what seems to me stones and serpents. I do not, however, have to wait till eternity to see the weight of glory worked for me by such temporary afflictions. When I walk with God here and now, I can see Him working to produce good fruit within me even today–joy, peace, patience, gentleness. Is not this, too, His goodness in my life? And will He not, along the way, manifest His goodness to me in ways I had never dreamed of myself? I will indeed see His goodness in the land of the living. Whether I suffer or celebrate, I can expect Him to keep that promise all the days of my life.

And so, I need not lose heart. The sun that seems now to be setting will rise with the new morning, illuminating for me every good gift God sends me in the year to come. After all, it is my birthday.