At 45: Twenty Behind, Twenty Ahead

This post started as I was reflecting on the end of 2025 and thinking about New Year's resolutions for 2026... then it hit me - Oh, I'm turning 45 this year!

Forty-five means checking a different box on surveys. No more 40 - 44. Now it's 45 - 50. You know that small stab when you jump a category? There it is. The big 5-0 looms next, absurd and inevitable.

But here’s the arithmetic that actually matters. Start working at 25, retire at 65. 45 is the exact midpoint. Twenty years behind me. Twenty ahead, if I’m granted them.

So what have I built with my first twenty?

For nineteen of those years, I was a mother. That’s not a rounding error; that’s the whole calculation, including pregnancy and everything in between. I didn’t have a career. But I worked full-time, no benefits, no performance reviews, and no tangible steady income.

I spent two decades chasing a standard society whispers, then shouts: the professional title, and the family with children who excel academically, musically, athletically. I couldn’t offer the first. So I made sure I delivered the second. The best schools. The best piano teachers. The best swim teams. Homework, practice, competition, grades, awards was where my voice the loudest in every room. Our home slowly became less like a home and more like a training ground, where love was often felt most clearly when performance was high.

Did it work? By every visible metric, yes. Both children succeed. Grades, music, sports — all checkmarks in the win column.

But I’ve started asking harder questions.

Is that how you raise humans?

What about character? Patience? Kindness? Manners? Salvation?

The first description of love in 1 Cor 13 is devastating in its simplicity: Love is patient.

I was not patient. I was a yeller.

I measured my days by completed to-do lists rather than shepherded hearts.

I built achievement and called it nurture.

By society’s standards, I succeeded.

By the standard that actually matters, I failed.

And that realization doesn’t pass quickly. It sits. It exposes. It names things I used to justify.

But here is what I am learning: our Lord is faithful even when we are not.

Those same years I spent mothering intensely, I also spent my energy somewhere else — in grad school, pursuing a degree in worship studies. I finished in 2023.

And then I told no one.

Those five grueling years of study deserved celebration, not three years of silence.

Why?

Because God used that program not to platform me, but to dismantle me.

I thought I was learning to lead worship. God thought otherwise.

Question after question, each one more piercing:

What is worship?

Do you love Me?

Are you worshipping Me in private?

Why do you want to stand up there?

And slowly, uncomfortably, the answer surfaced.

I discovered my answer was ugly. I wanted to be seen. I wanted recognition dressed in religious language. How dare I sing for Jesus when I was stealing His glory? True worship, in spirit and in truth, exposed my performance for what it was.

I didn't know God. I knew the stage.

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We started attending Berean with two classes remaining. And again, God pressed deeper into my understanding of my role as a woman, in the family and in the church.

I researched. I wrote. I wrestled.

The degree that could have made me a worship pastor became instead the reason I would never pursue it.

Some friends disagree. I understand that. I’m open to conversation.

But I am at peace with what I believe Scripture has taught me.

So. The next twenty.

I no longer want to drive.

That role exhausts me now—the managing, the controlling, the quiet assumption that my wisdom is what holds everything together. I spent years trying to build something meaningful. God kept reminding me, patiently but firmly: I build. You follow.

The cross covers more than the obvious sins. It covers the quieter ones too—the need to be recognized, the impatience that wounds, the subtle insistence on directing my own life.

And beyond that?

No detailed plans. No five-step vision. No urgency to prove anything.

Just a growing desire to walk faithfully.

Less striving.

More surrender.

And for the first time in a long time, that feels like enough.

Goodbye 44, hello 45!