What's my age again?

Steve Tibbert’s leadership blog is of the most helpful and readable blogs I’m aware of. It’s generally short and to the point and it looks a bit different to most as he highlights his points by making them bold and sometimes even uses italics.

He recently posted on comments by Gordon MacDonald on the different stages of life and the questions they bring:

• 20s – Who am I?
• 30s – How do I balance all this together?
• 40s – There must be something more than this!
• 50s – Can I hold on?
• 60s – Am I redundant?
• 70s – Was it all worth it?

I might suggest he missed out the teenage years: “Will anyone love me?” and the 80s: “Who am I again?”*

Unlike my more independent-minded missus, I like these kind of frameworks; they help me understand what’s going on in my life and they mitigate against my nagging suspicion that I ought to have sorted everything out by now.

I remember David Devenish suggesting a similar idea. He said that in your 20s and 30s what God is doing in you is more significant than what He does through you. Your most significant impact on others is likely to happen later. As 20s and 30s is the age when many of us first start to serve God this can be a bit confusing. Dave is far too much a pioneer to be suggesting that younger people need to be kept in cotton wool until we’re ‘old enough’; I think he’s just encouraging us to have a long-term view. The days are urgent but that should make us trust God’s timing all the more.

* It’s just a little joke, don’t moan.