For the first time in my life I found myself underemployed and the part-time and freelancing gigs I did have couldn't pay much and were inconsistent in hours. I had just graduated with two master's degrees from seminary and was at a loss for what to do next. On top of all of that, I was still single, my personal belongings were in storage, and I was renting a room from a family from my church. This is how I found myself on my thirtieth birthday.
 
Rewind a few years and I certainly wouldn't have envisioned all of that for my thirtieth birthday. I started what seemed to be a promising federal career at the age of 21, was surrounded with friends, actively involved in a vibrant church, and upon entry into seminary, did not seem too far away from marrying my best friend.

While I cherish my time in seminary and continued to learn much during the couple of years before my thirtieth, I definitely struggled with the challenges that came with all the uncertainty, largely because many aspects of my identity were being challenged. At a seminary that was still much a man's world, I found myself often on the periphery. I no longer was in a career in which I excelled. My boyfriend and I broke up instead of becoming engaged. Other relationships struggled to stay alive. My dream of full-time vocational was slipping away.

Shortly after I turned thirty, I decided to return to federal service. I am so grateful that due to my prior service the transition was a fairly seamless process and I'm thrilled to once again have a stable, exciting, well paying, and rewarding career. But I'll continue to struggle to discern whether my move was motivated by prudence or by insecurity, in faith or in fear.

Tim Keller's The Reason for God has a paragraph that speaks directly to this matter.
If anything threatens your identity you will not just be anxious but paralyzed with fear. If you lose your identity through the failure of someone else you will not just be resentful, but locked into bitterness. If you lose it through your own failings, you will hate or despise yourself as long as you live. Only if your identity is built on God and his love ... can you have a self that can venture anything, face anything. (p. 165)
 
While I've clearly seen aspects of the struggles to which Keller refers in my own life, I've also seen God's grace and mercy in the midst of it as I mature and as I embrace his own perfect love for me more fully. And I pray that despite whatever circumstances in which I find myself on perhaps my thirty-fifth, fortieth, fiftieth birthdays and so on that I will then better base my identity on my relationship with God and his love for me so that I may be free to serve him more fully in all that I do.