My father, a pastor of one of those mega churches lots of people like, was embroiled in a scandal that would eventually take him down, temporarily out of the game.
And I was left to wonder things I’d never wondered before.
Did God really care about me?
Did He see me, know my struggle to make sense of something hard?
Did He truly have a plan for my life or was I just the daughter of the pastor of things that went terribly wrong?
No one ever told me that I would one day question such things. Not when I was sitting like a lady in my pretty Easter dress on Sunday. Not when I was singing rhythmic VBS songs or running in the hallway of my beloved haven with a steeple.
Sweet little Jesus girls don’t grow up to be gritty grapplers...that is what I thought.
Some months later and with the help of a really intimidating shrink and {undoubtedly} the closet prayers of my mother, I reconciled such things and decided, in a new way, I would follow hard after God. {Mainly, I admit, because He was the only One who hadn’t bailed…which now I find a really good reason.}
But my struggle didn’t stop there. Because no one ever told me that in my 20’s, after I made such a dogged decision, that I would want to serve God but feel as though my age did not give me a real shot at influence. It was this noise, constantly in my head:
Who wants to listen to a 20-something without the life experience, the marriage, the kids, the years that people say help you know yourself, know God, and really just…grow up?
What I did not know was that God didn’t need me to be any older for me to be radical. Nor did He need me to disqualify myself or buy into what anyone might say about me being too young to really know anything about God.
He just wanted me. My heart. My desire. My gifts to be used for someone other than me. And He would insert the rest.
I needed to know this, as much as I needed to know months before that God was ok for me to question Him -- because a searching heart meant an inner hunger He would always be able to fill. And as I write this post, many years later, I am grateful, still, to know such things.
And so I say to you, my friend, 20-something or not, that is reading these words…
Search on. Ask Him the tough questions. And know that never are you too anything to do good Jesus work.
