29.

On growing in wisdom, stature, and favor with God and others.

AI-generated image of a cathedral in a forest of sequoias.

Today I turn 29, the last year of my twenties. Inspired by my friend Chris Martin’s post On Turning 32, I thought I would share some of my reflections on the last stretch of my twenties. I’ve never felt the way I have about a year as I do this one. It’s the feeling of transition. That this year exists as preparation for the next.

I think a lot about how for the first 30 years of Jesus’ life, it says that he “increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and with people” (Luke 2:52). He wasn’t in ministry. He was quietly working, participating in the temple and his community, and being—well—normal. He wasn’t healing or teaching or performing miracles. We know next to nothing about those first thirty years and I think that’s the point.

Jesus was hidden before he was revealed. He was formed before he performed his ministry. He experienced everything that we have experienced and that includes his first thirty years.

Even Jesus had to grow up.

The Success Sequence and Its Misgivings

When I think about the last near-decade of my life it feels more chaotic than I had anticipated. The vision put before me in my teens was the typical success sequence:

1. Get a high school diploma (or even better a college degree)

2. Work full-time

3. Marry before you have children.

I’ve ticked every box of the success sequence.

Whether this was intentionally communicated or I simply heard incorrectly out of ignorance (or arrogance), the plan for life as I understood it was that if you followed the steps and did everything correctly then life would be a steady journey up and to the right.

What I didn’t anticipate—and no one prepared me for—is that the road beyond those three markers was going to be rough, rocky, full of doubt, uncertainty, and even suffering.

For instance:

• Having many jobs within the last ten years instead of having a singular “career” for 40 years. Do careers exist anymore?

• Attending and leaving multiple churches for complicated reasons that include being horribly hurt by betrayal from pastors I trusted.

• Losing the last of my immediate family a year out of college and into marriage and having to make painfully difficult decisions around family, finances, living, and work in the resulting fall-out.

• Having my faith in shambles and being miraculously renewed.

• Going to seminary and dropping out of seminary.

• Being married and becoming a father with no father figure to seek wisdom from.

• Having a child in the middle of the first global pandemic in 100 years and a financial crisis.

• Raising a family in a world with rapidly changing technology and cultural values, the decline of Christianity in the West, and teetering on the precipice of a third world war.

I’ve just started The Second Mountain by David Brooks and even the intro should be required reading. In it he says:

For still others, something unexpected happens that knocks them crossways: the death of a child, a cancer scare, a struggle with addiction, some life-altering tragedy that was not part of the original plan. Whatever the cause, these people are no longer on the mountain. They are down in the valley of bewilderment or suffering. This can happen at any age, by the way, from eight to eighty-five and beyond. It's never too early or too late to get knocked off your first mountain.

These seasons of suffering have a way of exposing the deepest parts of ourselves and reminding us that we're not the people we thought we were. People in the valley have been broken open. They have been reminded that they are not just the parts of themselves that they put on display. There is another layer to them they have been neglecting, a substrate where the dark wounds, and most powerful yearnings live.

There’s wisdom in the success sequence. It’s the first mountain. But it leaves out the turbulent waves of the water we swim in through life. It gives the impression that checking the boxes makes you “grown up.” What I’m learning is that the milestones themselves are not what it means to “grow up” but it’s what you do with the invitations and challenges they bring to your life that determines whether you have truly “grown up”. That maturity isn’t a linear journey of growth in one direction but how you react to getting knocked off the first mountain and into the valley.

The Valley Between the Stages of Life

In Sacred Fire, Ronald Rolheiser talks about your first stage of life as “getting your life together”.

He says,

Invariably, the motifs and refrains that abound there will revolve around questions like: Who am I? Where do I find meaning? Who will love me? How do I find love in a world full of infidelity and false promises? Countless expressions of longing, of heartache, or searching; but in the end, one focus: a burning desire for a home we once had, somehow lost, and are looking for again. The struggle from being restlessly driven out of our first home to finding a state and a place to call home again is the journey of Essential Disicpleship.

My twenties have largely felt like floundering. Or maybe a more positive way of putting it would be experimenting. But that makes it sound far too intentional. Many things have simply happened that I had no control over and all I could do was react. There has been nothing steady about it. It’s been a series of starts and stops, highs and lows, lefts and rights, familiar rooms being shut tight, and unexpected doors opening when I least expected it. There are things I have hoped to do that I haven’t done and may never do, and other things I never thought would be possible but are suddenly within reach.

Why did I expect anything different? Is that on me? The environments I was in? Did I turn a blind eye to obvious reality or did a sale of false promises lead to erroneous expectations? Surely it’s all of these things and more.

Slowly but surely, my commitments began to crystalize. My wife. My home. My beliefs. My son. My job. My church. These are the commitments that I have chosen—voluntarily given myself over to—that will define the next chapter of my life, a chapter that will be the longest. My wife and son are “till death do us part.” I wouldn’t be surprised if my home was the same. Lord willing, my church will be too. I love my job and hope to stay with it as long as the Lord (and my bosses) allow.

I’m in it for the long haul.

I wasn’t prepared for it, but solidifying those commitments has activated a noticeable shift in my soul. I’m no longer “getting my life together.” Not in the sense of answering the questions that Rolheiser asks in the quote above. The questions I’m asking have changed. Now I find myself primarily asking, “What do I do with these commitments?” Or as Rolheiser again helpfully asks about this stage, “How do I give my life away more deeply, more generously, more meaningfully?” The challenge is to press into my commitments, forsaking the “second honeymoon” of the pursuit of happiness, reaching past the surface and into the deep well of meaningful joy. Brooks again says, “When I meet people leading lives of deep commitment, this fact hits me: Joy is real.”

As my good friend Stephen says, it’s time to build cathedrals and plant sequoias.

Preparation for the Journey and Lack Thereof

I’m excited to take on the new challenge. I simply wish someone had prepared me. Or more specifically, that preparing young people for the trek through time was a more normal aspect of our society. That wise men and women would walk with younger men and women who were just “getting their lives together” and say, “these are the unique challenges and invitations you will face. Here is how you can face them with Christ rather than alone.”

In theory, this is what our best youth and college ministries would do, but I fear, on the one hand, that we’ve Passion Conference’d our youth to lead them to expect the same highs and never-ceasing growth that I expected, and on the other hand, we have intellectualized discipleship so much that it becomes unmoored from the reality of our daily struggles and challenges to do much good. What good are facts and emotional highs if I have nothing to do with them in the mundanity of my unremarkable, everyday life?

Even better, this is what our families would do. But our culture has left our families broken and our cultural Christianity has largely left us without the wisdom of generations. In its wake, it left a series of slogans and platitudes instead of the deep insight that comes from decades of a faithful walk with Jesus in the difficulties of life.

Jesus grew in wisdom, stature, and favor with God and with people. When Jesus was getting his life together, he might have memorized the Torah, but it wasn’t an exercise for an Awana badge; he allowed it to make him wise. He grew in confidence and competence. He learned how to interact with people in ways that honored their dignity. Even God as man had to learn to navigate the world as men do in the way that God would.

The Adult in the Room

Twenty-nine to me feels like a staredown with thirty. A turning point. The overwhelming feeling I have now is one of no longer being the kid in the room, but now I’m the adult in the room. Even small, ordinary events this Thanksgiving holiday showed that to be the case. That feeling never came at 18, 21, or 26 despite all of life’s celebrations and sorrows. Something about twenty-nine is different.

Growth never stops, but Jesus’ example makes it clear that this next stage of life requires wisdom, stature, and favor with God and with people. I hope to cultivate those qualities in preparation for the long haul. A sort of self-initiation through diligent preparation into the second half of life in light of the cultural absence of such initiations.

I pray this coming year plants seeds that yield fruit decades in the future, not only in my life and my family but in the lives of others.

The next phase of life is the phase of giving my life away.