A raccoon in a trench coat

An honest reflection at 30

Photo by Bia W. A. on Unsplash

When I was a junior lawyer, two fellow juniors and I, in utter and honest self-deprecation, would laugh and describe ourselves as “three raccoons in a trench coat”. Together we were pretending to be one “adult” lawyer. We were expected to be “adult” lawyers. But we had no idea what we were doing.

I still have no idea what I’m doing (though it seems less funny in the context of my personal life). Sometimes the truth of the feeling feels like it splits my psyche in half, and two totally opposite things are true at the same time: that I am a little girl in women’s clothing, and that I am already too old and too late. I don’t know how they can both feel so true, and at the same time, but they do. And the pain of both those things is sometimes a little too much to bear.

I don’t feel 30 because my life at 30 doesn’t look the way I thought it would. And because my life doesn’t look a certain way, the reality of my life simultaneously infantilizes and geriatricizes¹ me. On the latter, I feel chronically late. And just like when I’m acutely late, there is a constant, low-grade (or not-so-low-grade) humming in my mind that makes me more anxious, more irritable, more reckless, more faithless, more afraid.

I think about time a lot. For me, time can be an idol. I attribute to it more power than I attribute to the God who thought it up,² and I often credit it with the ability to dictate my life. Sometimes I feel as if I am stuck in time (that I am still a little girl) or that time is stuck to me (that I am running out of it). Sometimes I feel like time laughs at me, rather than the other way around.³ But I have to remind myself — often out of nothing more than rote obedience — that none of my days are or were wasted. Not the days I spent retching over my toilet bowl, worshipping my pain. Not the days I spent in 24/7 libraries, barely sleeping, worshipping my striving. Not the days I spent alone, (literally) hiding from the world, worshipping my fear. Not the days I spent chasing my longings, worshipping my plan.

No, I pray over myself, I am redeemed.

Learning this has not been pretty. The lessons are drenched in longing and in grief and in shame and, for me, often wracked with sobs. But God breathes life back into my sobbing chest every time I read Isaiah 43, which begins with the words, But now:

But now thus says the Lord

(He has an announcement for me) —

he who created you, O Jacob,
he who formed you, O Israel:
Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.

I am redeemed. My life is redeemed.⁴ Not just my soul: my body, too, for I am not a spirit stuck in a meat cage. I am a vessel, and the entirety of this vessel — and everything that being a vessel encompasses — is redeemed. My being is redeemed from abuse, afflicted by my hand and by the hands of others. My time, too, is redeemed, meaning that He can reach back and reshape the things and choices of my past for good and for His glory.⁵ This redeeming is for us all, regardless of the different factual contours of our stories. And not just redeemed, I remind myself. My time is restored:

I will restore to you the years
that the swarming locust has eaten.⁶

The first time I read that verse, I wept. God doesn’t only redeem my life. In His love and goodness, because I have returned to Him with all my heart,⁷ He restores to me those days and nights and years. It doesn’t really make sense, logically speaking, but the restoring of time is a miraculous concept, not a human one. And it, too, is offered to us all. Because God made time. Accordingly, He — and only He — can restore it. I don’t even know what it means, really, to have my time restored, but I’m sticking around to find out.

It is altogether too easy, especially as a woman, to feel like I’m “behind” — biologically and psychologically and spiritually — on life and wifehood and motherhood and vocation. And since time moves at the same speed for us all, it’s easy to feel like I’m doomed to be “behind” forever. Those thoughts catch in my throat every single time. So, as always, I have to take them captive and make them obedient to Christ. Christ, my Redeemer. Christ, my Restorer.⁸ Christ, the Lord of time.⁹

I often still feel like a raccoon in a trench coat, too unprepared for life and unsuitably late for it. But now, says my God. “But” tells me things are about to be different. “Now” tells me He controls time.

And my life follows the breath of His mouth.

1. I think I made up this word.

2. Sometimes I think about the creation story. I think about how God created the world in six days — but it’s only described in days because that’s how God explains things to us after the fact. Time, I think, is just one creation to make sense of other creations. My brain squirms when I remember that.

3. Proverbs 31:25.

4. Psalm 34:22.

5. Romans 8:28.

6. Joel 2:25.

7. Joel 2:12.

8. Psalm 23:3.

9. 2 Peter 3:8.