I just turned 30.
Gasp.
It's crazy because I have this very specific memory from college. I was an 18-year-old freshman, rooming with a 20-year-old senior at the time. Sometime that winter she turned 21, and I remember looking at her and saying, "Oh my gosh Henrietta... you're only nine years away from 30."
To which she immediately replied, "No, no, no, no, don't say that!"
Fast forward a few years. I'm out of college, watching Gary Vee videos. Young twenty-somethings would religiously line up to ask him what they should do with their lives or where they should start. And almost every time his response started something like this:
"You have so much time. You're x years from 30."
Now, being 30, I can tell you this:
You may have a lot of it. But time does indeed fly.
I realize that can feel especially daunting for young women.
As a late teen and early twenty-something looking ahead, 30 felt like the sunsetting of everything us girls cherish—youth, beauty, relevance, opportunity. I think many young women understand that feeling. If you've gotten this far, I'm willing to bet you do too.
As women, many of us grow up with the idea that our value has a peak. We can't quite pinpoint where it is, but it's somewhere in our early twenties. No one has to say it out loud—you just know.
When you're 13, you want to look 20-something.
When you're 40, you want to look 20-something.
Hence the beloved Forever 21.
And it makes you wonder: when did we decide that one decade was the pinnacle of our existence? That you get one shining era and then spend the rest of your life looking back at it?
Looking back, I think a lot of the fear surrounding 30 came from that assumption. Not that life was ending, but that somehow the best of it would already be behind me.
But standing here now, I know that isn't what year 30 is supposed to mean.
You're not supposed to feel less. You're not supposed to feel like a shadow of yourself. If anything, you should feel like more.
More aware of your purpose. More aware of the gifts God has placed inside of you. More aware of the people you're called to serve. More aware that life didn't culminate in your twenties—it was where the foundation was being laid.
In my twenty-ninth year, I spoke at a women's retreat (though in much fear and trembling). I became a board member of a nonprofit I deeply love. I stepped into a new leadership position at work. I found myself carrying things that twenty-one-year-old me would have been utterly crushed under the pressure of.
None of that looks like life narrowing.
It looks like life expanding.
I think too often we talk about what time takes away, but not enough about what time gives. Discernment. Perspective. Depth. The ability to carry more. The ability to see beyond yourself and see generations coming after you that desperately need what you can give them.
Wisdom.
Let me pause here because this can easily be interpreted as a dissertation on how I've figured everything out in life and live it flawlessly.
I have not.
I am an incredibly flawed individual with a big calling from a God whose grace I've had the pleasure of becoming well acquainted with in my twenties. And if there is one thing He's taught me, it's that we grow from glory to glory.
The people we admire most shouldn't be the women who have managed to stay young forever (though I'll forever be floored by the seventy-year-old woman at the grocery store who doesn't look a day over fifty). They should be the people who decided to keep growing. The people who kept learning, kept seeking, kept building, and kept showing up when life didn't look the way they thought it would.
For my pre-thirty somethings, don't look at the future with dread; look at it with promise. Get acquainted with your wiring, your purpose, how you serve others, and where you come alive. Then take it a step further. What's your impact when you are no longer here? How will the world be better because you walked this earth? See beyond your lifetime and into the lifetime of someone who will be better off because of some piece of goodness you left behind. I think the best parts of ourselves are revealed when we begin asking those questions.
For my thirty-somethings and counting—come close.
There is time for you.
Though I know age often brings wisdom, I am also painfully aware that it can also bring regret and hopelessness if we don't see our lives correctly. If you're not where you thought you'd be by now, if you've been silently living in painful memories of the past, or if shame has convinced you that your best years are behind you, do not give in to that voice of hopelessness. Do not give in to fear. Do not give in to despair. Start the business, make the move, write the book, start communing with God and allowing Him to whisper to your heart all that He has for you now—not yesterday, not ten years ago, but now.
And in all your doing, don't forget to reach back to the young women coming behind you. They need your wisdom, your insight, and your guidance too.
Gals, there is so much ahead of you. There is a new type of beauty to experience in every stage of life.
What are you going to do?
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