I am 35 years old. Even as I write it, it doesn't fit me. I guess I have actually now lived on the earth for 35 years but it's all of the unspoken implications of being 35 that don't fit me. Inside, I am still a young man with many "I'm gonna do/be that someday"'s on the table. It doesn't feel natural to realize that there are some things that, more than likely, I am never going to be or do. I am in the prime of my life and strangely enough, there is a sadness to it.I guess that's one of the greatest trajedies of the fall. Our "prime" is a very short lived window of time. It is a time where we have to narrow down the "do/be's" of our lives down to one or two things so that we have the time to be excellent at at least one thing. It is most likely the time that will define our lives and how people will speak of us at our funeral. We may be defined by our vocational success or what we did as a volunteer or how we were as parents or spouses but most of it will happen during these "prime" years.
I think part of the reason that all of this feels so fleeting and unnatural is that it was never meant to be this way. I believe that God has built us for unending life and that sense is built into our DNA that was passed down to us from Adam and Eve. I think we were designed to say "someday I'm going to do that" and in an unfallen world, eventually we would get around to "doing that" and still have the mental and physical capacity to do whatever "that" may be. I don't think that God ever meant for us to have to 'narrow' our possibilities of what we will do with our lives. I also don't believe that God ever meant for us to experience sadness even in the midst of the "prime" of our lives because of the awareness of how fleeting that time is. "Prime" in God's kingdom is an ever-present and everlasting state of being.