At 40: What I Would Say to My 20-Year-Old Self
Words by Sara Hagerty
Artwork by Wookie Jones
My diploma was still in an unopened Manila envelope on my apartment desk when I stood in front of a crowd of 300 sets of smiling eyes to tell them about what I’d committed to doing for the rest of my life. Though I didn’t say it in so many words, at 22, I knew I wanted to change the world for God.
The night of our ministry fundraising banquet, I was in high heels and a new pencil skirt—dressed like I felt. Pulled together, tight, and ready to inspire.
I arrived at the hotel in a flurry just before the banquet started. I brushed past moms of teenagers and grandmothers on the committee of this organization and businessmen and women who had careers about which I knew nothing. Tonight we’d converged around the significant. I didn’t think much about what they’d left behind at home to be there. We had vision to impart.
At 20, I was a sprinter. Forty felt old and 30 not yet worth considering. I’d known God for a few years now. Time was already lost—there was so much to do for Him. I was full of vision, nevermind an entry-level position when there was a front of the pack.
I wanted my life to show up on the map. My name, written across lives and stories and kingdom-impact. (My laundry could wait.)
And this was all before social media.
I could blink, and I would be right back there, except now what I remember about that night is the graying 50-year-old who grabbed my hand after the evening was over and told me she’d been praying for me in the dark of the morning. The worn creases along the corners of her eyes looked like pencil markings, years of experience shadowing the fire behind them. I remember the mother of four who had a dignified weight to her countenance but yet spent her days carpooling teenagers and unpacking backpacks and warming the sidelines of soccer games. I remember the 60-year-old businessman of very few words—must be boring to be him, I thought back then—who, many years later, taught my husband how to pray through his dark night.
I’m days away from 40 and scanning that crowd all over again, except this time I’m not behind a podium, wanting that each person in that room would give their lives to something significant. I’m standing in the back, valuing all that isn’t seen but which holds great value.
At 20, I couldn’t yet see that things like having a name, being a point on the map for someone’s life or their day, wouldn’t sustain me.
At 20, I didn’t know that 300 sets of hands applauding would never come close to how I would feel when I got a private whisper from God, a look my way from the One who made me.
“All these things that felt like roadblocks at 20 ended up being the very circumstances that made me find Him.”
I hadn’t considered, at 20, that being snubbed by a friend or overlooked by a leader wasn’t the end of me, but the beginning of a conversation with Him that would alter my insides. I didn’t realize that God could turn hasty judgment by man into an opportunity for His validation.
All these things that felt like roadblocks at 20 ended up being the very circumstances that made me find Him. In the tireless paper chase for adoption that didn’t include ultrasound pictures—about which few friends could understand—I found His eyes on me. When the big church with the beautifully profound vision we helped start folded, I saw Him…seeing me. While I was turning out the lights in a mostly-empty home with mostly empty bedrooms at night, He was most near me. God gives a gift in being hidden. Himself.
I didn’t expect that I could find Him, just as much, in sweatpants scrubbing the grout along the corners of my bathroom tub on a Saturday as when I was hearing scores of teenagers tell me that I’d changed their lives.
(I didn’t know that His sending place, for those who actually do change the world, often is in the rooms without doors or windows, with just Him.)
The “likes,” the applause, the fanfare, and recognition—we crave it because we were made for it. We scan our social media feed, subtly wondering how we might posture ourselves to be seen. Yet (let’s admit it) we are so often ignorant that only one set of eyes can validate the parts of us that He uniquely made.
We resent being overlooked. Yet, could it be that God hides us just so that we might find that single set of eyes? Masked, by Him and for Him.
At 40, I’m finding the craving for that set of eyes on me is the only deep-unto-deep passion that can keep me up at night and make me reach toward changing the world, but perhaps in a way that can mostly—only—be validated by Him.
At 40, I’m becoming a distance runner.
When I was 22, I ran a marathon. The hardest part of the 26.2 miles was when the spectators thinned, and fatigue set in. I’d been pounding the pavement for hours, and now no one but the other racers—fatigued, themselves—could see or cheer or celebrate.
Though I mentally prepared for that stretch, I can still feel the tiredness in my bones when I think of running it, unseen.
After I finished the race, I likened the last stretch before the finish line, where there were wall-to-wall fans (including a dozen who came just for me) to my wedding day.
It had been one of my top five best moments of life. The unhinged cheers of fans whose brothers and girlfriends and children had trained for months for this—sometimes even two times a day, running and forcing their untrained bodies into a submission of the road ahead of them—were knowing.
They celebrated from a place of understanding. And I loved that celebration. I was received into the finish chute by volunteers trained to care for ones like me who had given months of their life to this. That last stretch was powerful.
At 40, though, I look back on that race with different eyes.
It’s mile 21 that I revere.
Months of work, both mental and physical, planning, and prayer, and only One saw the point I wanted to quit.
Only One could know how Saturday long runs at 6 a.m. in the dark danced in my mind as I considered forfeiting it all, at mile 21.
At mile 21, I met with God—in a way I didn’t when the crowds swelled with applause.
In that unseen, hidden stretch, I moved from being a runner to a marathoner.
Now here I am, near 40, and being unseen is no longer drudgery. I can’t wait to find His eyes on me there.
We are made in secret. (Psalm 139:15)
Print isn’t dead.
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