Quarter Life Crisis

I turned 26 this week. Thanks to those who sent nice messages and such. It was a good day. For the heck of it I made banana bread/cake for the boys. I didn’t tell them it was because it was my birthday. Birthdays aren’t a thing at all here. The upper class keeps track of birth dates but most people don’t. Most of the population doesn’t know their date of birth and a number of the boys at the centers aren’t even sure what year they were born.

They loved the cake. Sudanese don’t do a whole lot of baking and certainly not with bananas. Shama (the cook lady) had me explain to her twice how to make it. Success! Then in the evening I went to a friends flat and we played bananagrams and ate cake. A lovely evening.

This is the first year I feel like I’m getting old. I’m sure some of my more mature readers just roooooolled your eyes at that sentence. Bear with me. I don’t think I’m old yet. But I’m starting to feel like I’m getting older. Something I’m not so thrilled about. I think it’s because the years in my 20s are winding down and that makes me feel like I should have myself a little more together. I feel like in your early/mid 20s you’re finishing college, going on to grad school or getting job or whatever--it’s still kind of ok if you are puttering around and figuring the direction you want your life to take. But now I feel like I'm arriving in the age of real adulthood and I don't have myself together enough for that. The dreams I have for my life are silly things that don’t count as a career path. I know the kind of person I’d like to be and the kind of stuff I would like to do. But cooking, creating, running, studying nutrition, having chickens, loving well and living generously…these things will not get me a visa. I’m on a student visa now and will need to change my visa when I come back after home assignment next year. I absolutely want to continue working with the boys, so I’m looking for some sort of part-time something. Did a bit of brainstorming with some folks a few weeks ago and they were like “What is your ideal?” I don’t know! I’m floundering in vision. I really want to work with/help poor people. But the ideas that sound really cool and interesting I feel absolutely incapable and/or under qualified for. And the stuff that I’m like, “Yeah, I handle that” are things that I don’t find that interesting at all. But God goes before me and has paved the way for everything up to this point. I’m not worried. Not yet anyway. More than sure all will be most well.

So I’m getting older. Hopefully wiser. Not sure what I have to show for these 26 years, but I suppose life isn’t really about proving yourself is it? Oh the desire to glorify self…a curse of the world we live in!

“My counsel is this: Live freely, animated and motivated by God's Spirit. Then you won't feed the compulsions of selfishness. For there is a root of  sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit, just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness. These two ways of life are antithetical, so that you cannot live at times one way and at times another way according to how you feel on any given day. Why don't you choose to be led by the Spirit and so escape the erratic compulsions of a law-dominated existence?" Galatians 5:16-18

"I must be a mermaid. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living." Anais Nin

I love that.