Birthday Thoughts

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Where do you see yourself in twenty years (let’s be honest, none of us saw ourselves here when we were asked that back in 2000)?

What are your short-term and long-term goals?

Want to know a secret? It’s my birthday.

While many people probably evaluate how their goals are going on January 1st, I tend to think about them more on the day I entered the world. I’m not quite the big 4-0, yet, although it looms closer with each revolution of the earth.

It’s easy to think, “I’ll be able to accomplish insert-crazy-big-dream-here by the age of …” Then, when it doesn’t happen, we start to doubt. Maybe we shouldn’t have set such high expectations. Maybe we’re not good enough. Maybe we’re not meant to be able to do that.

But then again, maybe we just aren’t ready yet.

If you’re like me, you set your standards of when things should happen in your life by what you see around you. I graduated high school and college on time, got married a month later, and had a plan for my life. I’d have a baby around age twenty-five, and hopefully have a book published by then, too. Ask me if that plan worked.

NO.

Instead, we struggled through years of infertility and other issues and I didn’t become a mother until the age of thirty-two. And my book wasn’t published until I was thirty-five.

I might have been able to handle being a mother back at the age I wanted to, but I know I’m probably wiser and better able to handle all that comes with motherhood because of those years of waiting and experience.

And, as to the writing part, well, I’ve learned A LOT since then. My books are much better today than anything I was throwing on the page back then. Deeper and more meaningful, too.

Life doesn’t always go the way we plan, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. Just that we might have more growing to do. And now, I’m about to celebrate the release of a third book in October and a fourth in March. I honestly can’t complain.

Not about that, anyway.

Has your life gone the way you expected? Looking back, can you see it’s better if it didn’t?

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Amy R Anguish, author of An Unexpected Legacy and Faith & Hope, grew up a preacher’s kid, and in spite of having lived in seven different states that are all south of the Mason Dixon line, she is not a football fan. Currently, she resides in Tennessee with her husband, daughter, and son, and usually a bossy cat or two. Amy has an English degree from Freed-Hardeman University that she intends to use to glorify God, and she wants her stories to show that while Christians face real struggles, it can still work out for good.

Check out her book, Faith & Hope, available now.

Her new book, Saving Grace, releases October 2020.

Follow her at http://abitofanguish.weebly.com or http://www.facebook.com/amyanguishauthor