I Want To Live An Adventure

I think I am having what my professor might call “a quarter-life crisis.” I have exactly one week left until I am officially a senior in college, the much-anticipated year where all the big decisions of the entirety of my future must be decided at the age of 21. As I have been filling out applications for summer internships and crossed paths with people who are aware that my entrance into “real adulthood” is quickly approaching, the dreaded question of, “What do you want to do with your life?” has been asked far too many times. My answers tend to vary with whether the person asking would really want to me hear me out until the end or just hear the concise answer, “I want to be a writer.”

I don’t want to be a writer. I want to live an adventure. Yes, that may be the dream of a young woman that has yet to be thrust out into the “real world,” but why does it always have to be just a dream?

What do I want to do with my life? I want to live an adventure. I want to move to South Africa, do reconciliation work, fight for unity rather than racial division. I want to spend my life striving for the embraced diversity that Christ modeled for his church. And yes, I do want to write.

But even if none of these things happen, even if I stay in California and go into an entirely different field of work, I want to live an adventure. Why does that have to be just a young person’s dream? Is it really the young who have bought the lie that our lives can be something great? Or is the rest of humanity that has bought the lie that their lives can never be a grand adventure?