When I was 11 years old, I wrote a letter to my 21-year-old self.
I can’t recall the exact details now, decades later, but my educated guess is that it’s because I read a book wherein the protagonist did just that (historians have most recently theorized, based on the reference to a somewhat mysterious “Emily” within this ancient text, that young Meagan was perhaps inspired by L.M. Montgomery’s lesser lauded series, Emily of New Moon).
Whatever the catalyst, young Meagan eagerly filled a few pages with elementary-school- scrawling predicting the future life she would have, peppered her future self with questions, carefully stored the letter in her little wooden treasure box, and promptly forgot about it for a long while.
I grew up. I graduated high school. I went to college. I graduated college. I moved into my first apartment, and in the process of packing up my room, I found the letter. Sitting in what was about to become my old room, holding this unassuming envelope in my hands, I felt one thing: dread. I buried it under a stack of old birthday cards and letters, dumped it in a box filled with more keepsakes, and endeavored to forget about it once again.
Already in my early twenties, I was still working the hourly job I’d had through college, which had nothing to do with the degree I just completed. I’d made it all through high school and college with barely a whiff of a crush, let alone any type of romantic relationship. Many of my friends were dating or already married; the ones who weren’t seemed to have unlocked a magical path to pursuing their dream careers that I had yet to find. Needless to say, I had very little interest in opening that letter and confronting all the many ways I was not the imagined Future Meagan that my past self had blithely assumed she was writing to.
What followed were several years of vague discontentment, insecurity, and loneliness. For me, this took the form of a particular kind of pride, where my mourning turned into self-beratement. What was wrong with me, that I couldn’t seem to find that elusive Special Someone I wanted to spend the rest of my life with? What was I doing wrong that I seemed unable to find the right choices leading me to that singular future God must have for me? I pictured God watching me stumble around my life with exasperation, frustrated at the way I was constantly fumbling past the path he’d laid out for me.
But God himself is, of course, a much kinder God than the one I so often construct in my head, and one quiet afternoon he cut straight through this angsty shame-spiral with a calm whisper. Standing alone in my little kitchen one afternoon, I had a sudden thought that could not have possibly come from my own brain:
“Who told you I promised you a husband?”
With faithfulness and grace, he used this question to start a several-years work of adjusting my self-pitying focus back where it belonged: on him and the truths of his Word. The question led to another and another, an avalanche of logical next steps digging straight at the heart of the truth: What does God truly promise about my life? He promises he has a plan for me. He promises that plan is good. He promises to walk alongside me as he brings that plan to fruition.
Nowhere in the bible does he promise me a relationship, a husband, a picture-perfect family. And once he showed me the reality of that fact, there was one last question he had for me to answer: Is God still good if I never get married?
More accurately—because God is good no matter my feelings—the question was, do I believe that God is still good? Once I admitted to myself that there was no other honest way to answer other than yes, I do believe God is still good if I never get married, I felt one thing: relief.
I was able to see the challenge he had just walked me through for what it was—freedom from the lies I had been telling myself about God and his designs for me, freedom from expectations I had been failing that weren’t from God, but from my own sinful pride and the self-focused condemnation I had been wallowing in.
On that quiet, solitary afternoon, God began a work in me that he has faithfully continued to this day; one that has grown me in an understanding of him and his lovingkindness, and a contentment to continue along the path that he has set for me, not one I’ve constructed for myself.
A few years ago, I was moving yet again and found something I’d forgotten about for years—a letter, addressed in childish hand to the writer’s 21-year-old self. This time I did open it, and soon found myself laughing so hard tears were streaming down my face. Rather than dread, regret, or disappointment, I was able to read with joy and humor paragraph after paragraph of assumptions for a life I’d never lived—because the life I am living, by God’s grace, is so much better than I could’ve asked for or imagined.
