Who I Want to Be

"To think that this is my twentieth birthday, and that I've left my teens behind me forever," said Anne, who was curled up on the hearth-rug with Rusty in her lap, to Aunt Jamesina who was reading in her pet chair. They were alone in the living room. Stella and Priscilla had gone to a committee meeting and Phil was upstairs adorning herself for a party. 



"I suppose you feel kind of, sorry" said Aunt Jamesina. "The teens are such a nice part of life. I'm glad I've never gone out of them myself." 



Anne laughed. 

"You never will, Aunty. You'll be eighteen when you should be a hundred. Yes, I'm sorry, and a little dissatisfied as well. Miss Stacy told me long ago that by the time I was twenty my character would be formed, for good or evil. I don't feel that it's what it should be. It's full of flaws." 



"So's everybody's," said Aunt Jamesina cheerfully. "Mine's cracked in a hundred places. Your Miss Stacy likely meant that when you are twenty your character would have got its permanent bent in one direction or 'tother, and would go on developing in that line. Don't worry over it, Anne. Do your duty by God and your neighbor and yourself, and have a good time. That's my philosophy and it's always worked pretty well.”

-Anne of the Island by Lucy Maude Montgomery

I’ve been thinking about this lately, particularly since I myself turned twenty. Am I who I want to be? Who I feel I should be?

Sometimes there are moments when it hits me that in some small way I’m living a life I’ve dreamed about.

Maybe it’s when I’m practicing phonetics or signing up for classes with names like “Grammatical Analysis”, because when I was younger I used to read books by people like Michael Crichton and Ted Dekker and Madeleine L’Engle and see characters called very specific things like “paleobotanists” and “biochemists” and “marine biologists”, not because of their jobs but because of what they know, who they are. I’d dream of being that too, being an expert at something, being the sort of person that people would call in when they had a certain sort of problem. I didn’t think it would ever be possible, because I’m no scientist and while I was good at math it wasn’t something I wanted to make a career out of. So being sort of on my way to being a “linguist” gives me some deep inner satisfaction.

Or perhaps it’s when I’m in yoga pants with my hair pulled up, doing laundry at midnight and eating yogurt out of a coffee mug. Just because being that girl always seemed fun. It feels like college.

Maybe it’s when I’m scrunching the curly hair I wished I had for years before I started perming it, or when I’m learning to teach English and remembering all the people who ever came up to me after a VBS lesson or a study hall or a mission trip report-back and told me that I should be a teacher someday, or when I’m walking into chapel and remembering how much I wanted to come to Moody and how anxiously I awaited that acceptance letter.

But then I think about my prayer life, my devotional life, my inner thought life. And then I’m not always so sure that I’m who I want to be. I remember my junior year of high school, when I was so consistent in the Word and so ardently in love with my God. Then I was so convinced that I would never, ever give up reading my several chapters per day, because I was so utterly convinced that it was truly what sustained me. I understood how desperately I needed it, and I sincerely loved it. Where did that go? There was a time when I was starting to grasp what it really means to pray without ceasing, but somehow that understanding slipped through my fingers. I know there are mountains and valleys in everyone’s life, but—I understood. What happened?

So I thank Jesus for the process of sanctification, for His promise to be the same even when I fluctuate, for the assurance that my sin is cast far from me.

And I take heart in realizing that I do care about these things—that even if I am not that person, I still want to be.