Time to bite the bullet. No more putting it off. Today, I am officially thirty years old. I have existed on this planet for three entire decades. I am old enough to have actually spent money on a ringtone for my cell phone. My first cellphone actually had buttons and flipped open and closed. I’m old enough to know that the “save symbol” is a floppy disc, and I have actually used one. I remember having to get off the internet so my parents could make a phone call. I remember Rugrats, Clarissa Explains It All, and when MTV actually played music. I even stayed up late multiple times to call into a radio show to request a song. I had an iPod that had a click wheel (and I still kinda miss it). If I wanted to hear a song, I had to look it up on Limewire and hope I didn’t get a virus when I downloaded it. I watched the very first Spider-Man movie in theaters and it blew my young mind. I had a Gameboy Color that I played in the backseat of my parent’s minivan on long trips.

Looking back, I’ve done a lot to fill up the thirty years I’ve had so far, and yet it doesn’t feel like it’s been a long time. I often find myself wondering when I’ll begin to feel like I’ve grown up. When I was a kid, it always seemed to me that the adults in my life had it all figured out. They were confident and competent. They always knew what to do, and as a kid who never seemed to have a clue, I couldn’t wait until I was like that. When I became a teenager, I thought I would start to figure this out, but I was still hopelessly lost as an adolescent. If anything, I was filled with even more questions. I thought that maybe on my eighteenth birthday it would change and the process of becoming a real adult would begin, but no. Unfortunately, nothing changed. Surely when I graduated from college then I would have attained all the knowledge and understanding I need to really feel like an adult. Graduation came and left and all I really gained was a piece of paper with mine and my alma mater’s name on it. Every birthday I kept waiting to finally feel like an adult.

Now that I’m thirty and still don’t feel like an adult, I’ve come to the realization that I probably never will. I admit defeat. That whole feeling of confidence, as if I have the entire world figured out, isn’t going to happen to me. No matter how old I get, I will never feel grown up. I don’t think I’ll ever get my “adult certificate” or truly feel like I’ve grown up, but you know what? I think for the first time in my life I’m ok with that. It’s taken me thirty years to realize that no one truly has this whole thing figured out, and that’s by design.

In Mat 18:3-4 Jesus says that if we are to enter the Kingdom of Heaven then we need to become humble like a little child. The key word there is “humble.” I consider myself a theologian. I spend a large amount of my time as a student and a pastor trying to figure out what God is saying through scripture. It should be understandable that I don’t want to end up saying “I don’t know.” I want to have answers and to be confident in what God wants, but the thing is I can’t always know. I say “I don’t know” with astonishing frequency, but that’s not entirely a bad thing. In fact, it’s what Jesus wants from us. That child like faith that Jesus is talking about means just that. Children don’t always know what’s going on. They often have to admit that they don’t know things and that they don’t understand. That’s the same with our own faith. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t strive to try and understand God’s word and His will, because He clearly asks us to do this, but we need to become comfortable with not understanding everything.

I wanted to become an adult so badly as a kid because I thought that once I did life would make sense. Turns out life doesn’t always make sense even to those who have been living it for many decades. Life is confusing and weird. There’s a line in the song “Heretic” by Gable Price and Friends that says ”A grain of sand upon an island | the real estate inside your eyelids | I’m a tooth inside a smile.” The entire song wrestles with the idea of trying to understand who God is. Eventually, the answer the song provides is that God is simply too large and great and we are too small, like a grain of sand on an island, for us to ever completely understand Him. If no one can ever completely comprehend and grasp God and understand completely what life is about, then our goal changes from trying to understand everything to learning how to live with the uncertainty of life. Learning to live with the grand mystery of life is learning to have the faith of a child. How can we place our faith in God if we think we have it all figured out? Rather than have life figured out, God wants us to trust Him instead.

As I grow older, I still find myself indulging that kid who stayed up late playing on his Gameboy past his bedtime. I look up at the stars at night and feel just how small I am in comparison to it all. I think about the complexity of life and how God works to set the universe in motion, but still cares enough about me to have a relationship with me. I catch myself day dreaming while staring at clouds and find myself getting lost in the deep questions of life. It used to bother me that I didn’t understand these things, but I’ve been learning to live with the uncertainty. I really think that’s what actually comes with age. We don’t necessarily become wiser as we get older, instead we become more humble. Maybe we just live with the big questions about life long enough that we simply become comfortable not knowing the answers. Just like how a child trusts in their parents to keep everything going, we have to trust in God to be in control of it all. So it doesn’t matter if I ever feel like I’m grown up, because I’d rather feel like a child anyways. It’s like how C.S. Lewis once said, “When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”