A Theology of Your Twenties

The eternal significance of the in-between

This Weekly Edition of Inkwell features Chloe Rhodes

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AT TWENTY-SEVEN (almost twenty-eight) and living at home with my parents, I find myself on a quiet Monday morning, pondering all that has led me to this present moment. Pulling on a college sweatshirt from the floor of my childhood bedroom. Tiptoeing downstairs for a cup of coffee my dad has already brewed. Staring absentmindedly at the fridge, now a collage of save-the-dates and baby shower invitations. The routine feels eerily similar to life at seventeen, save for a few differences. For one, those hand-lettered envelopes are addressed to me, sent by my friends rather than those of my parents. And for another, I feel far less certain now than I did back then.

At seventeen, I was absolutely convinced of how life would unfold. I had the resolute conviction that everything–career, marriage, purpose–would fall into place exactly as it should, and on time. I assumed I’d naturally stumble into meaningful work, that I would “fall” in love as effortlessly as the phrase implies, that my calling would announce itself with unmistakable clarity, just as the word suggests. I envisioned my twenties as a decade of steady milestones shared in tandem with friends who were reaching them, too.

Les joueurs de jacquet backgammon by Jean Béraud

But somewhere between growing older and the endless stream of weddings, bachelorette weekends, and baby registries slowly chipping away at my teacher’s salary, those great expectations started to unravel. While my peers honeymooned in Mexico, I sat through awkward, ultimately unsuccessful first dates. While they earned promotions, I was begging for a classroom with functioning air conditioning. While they bought starter homes, I hunted for discounts at department stores. And all the while, I quietly wondered: What should my life look like in my twenties?

TO COMPLICATE AN ALREADY tumultuous decade, growing up in the South meant that I was raised with the cultural and religious conviction that marriage and motherhood were my destined roles. I assumed that I would be pregnant alongside my sisters, double-dating with my friends, using my late grandmother’s china at dinner parties, and passing down my baby dolls to my own children. But as I approached my mid-twenties, still arguably young, and found myself neither married nor settled. I struggled to reconcile my present circumstances with the internalized expectations of what my life should be. Even the familiar one-liners rooted in Scripture, “God will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4) or simply “Pray about it!” (Matthew 7:11), felt increasingly irrelevant through the unpredictability of life. What was I supposed to do when both the china and the baby dolls lay untouched, gathering dust?

Desperate to escape this awkward in-between—this space between hoping and having—I searched everywhere for the reference photo everyone else seemed to have, the one that allowed them to piece together the puzzle of life with such certainty. But while they committed to careers, marriages and cities with unwavering certitude, I only grew more hesitant, unsure of what to do or who to become. I kept wondering why the life I imagined ten years ago felt so far away, and even began to question the questioning itself. I’m almost twenty-eight, after all. Shouldn’t I have some of the answers by now? It’s easy to feel like we’ve somehow fallen behind or missed a step in the elusive formula for success.

At the heart of this analysis, what we are really asking is, What do I do in this awkward middle space when the outcomes haven’t materialized yet, and maybe never will?

Then I found the BEMA podcast.

Its founder, Marty Solomon, is a theologian who experienced his own crisis of faith in his mid-twenties. He, too, felt as though the spiritual spaces he was a part of offered packaged, systemized theology that didn’t address his gut-level questions. In search of something more, he became a student of Ray Vander Laan, an expert in biblical cultural studies. Under Vander Laan’s guidance, Solomon began to read Scripture through the lens of Jewish perspective, with which it was originally written. “I had been taught to view the Scripture through a very Western classical theology,” Solomon reflects in the first episode,“And that Western lens bumping up against an Eastern world was where a lot of that dissonance was coming from.”

This notion resonated—so much had been lost when I approached God with assumptions, organizing Biblical truth into neat outlines, bullet points, and lists. By attempting to let go of my Western interpretation of my very own existence, I began to embrace the evolving nature of esse—a reality rooted not in fixed outcomes, but in discovery.

This framework does not mean truth becomes relative, but rather that it is recognized as dynamic, constantly expanding and moving in multiple directions. It is a truth revealed through images, stories, poems, parables, songs, and shifting perspectives, one that guides us toward mastering the art of accepting the ever-unfolding process.

A CHIASM IS A specific literary device used in the ancient world which emphasizes the value of this exact process. This device, a form of parallelism, creates a mirrored structure, where the first part of the narrative corresponds with the second, drawing the reader's attention to its central point, a delicious middle. Solomon explains that “when the ancient audience encountered a chiasm, they knew exactly what to do with it”—they would readily identify the pattern which had been meticulously crafted by the author to point directly to the heart of the story. The chiasm is hidden within the text, like a treasure waiting to be discovered, offering a richer, more intimate learning experience.

In the West, we tend to focus heavily on information, emphasizing being told something rather than engaging in independent discovery. As a result, we typically regard the conclusion of a story as its most significant lesson. In contrast, the Eastern perspective understands that the author is intentionally burying something within the narrative for the reader to uncover. In this tradition, the most profound insights are often found not at the beginning or the end, but right in the center of the story.

A sacred treasure might just lie hidden at the heart of the narrative, waiting for curious minds to find it.

I have been thinking much of chiasms lately, the significance of the middle. There’s something profound about abandoning the need for immediate and clear answers, embracing the raw process of discovery. It’s a kind of getting our hands dirty, sinking deep into the big questions and manually unearthing layers of rich thought. It’s no longer about waiting for the end to receive revelation. It’s about tasting the juicy substance of the in-between. The chiasm, where both the beginning and the end converge, is a space brimming with purpose, discovery, and goodness.

So too are our twenties. Sandwiched between the innocence of adolescence and the maturity of later adulthood, we find ourselves frantically searching for ourselves. Rather than desperately reaching towards the milestones we all believe would thrust us to a specified destination, perhaps we gently settle into where we are right now.

I WELCOME THE GROWING PAINS of this present moment. Though it is challenging, I have found solace in naming the chaos around me, in confessing my disappointments, in expressing my uncertainty. I have become as much of an observer as I am a participant, stepping into the sanctity of simply being, releasing the need for formulaic living. It has been a great wrestle and a great reward.

I’ve lived life alongside many other twenty-somethings, most of them also wondering if life is supposed to feel this uncertain, this hallowed, this scarred, this true.

Despite the different phases of life we are navigating—singleness, fatherhood, wifehood, relationship-tied loneliness—we are far more alike than we are different; we are all insecure about the direction of our lives; we all long for difference while simultaneously resisting change; we are satisfied and heartbroken, overwhelmed and bored out of our minds.

And if you are asking the same question as me—what should my life look like in my twenties?—welcome. I don’t guarantee that the answer will be the same for all of us, but I do hope that, as we navigate this turbulent, unpredictable decade, we can bare our hearts transparently and join our shaking hands in prayer, in accountability, in communion. In this doubt, in this joy—I’ll meet you there, every time.

Such are your twenty-somethings.

Such is being human.

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Chloe Rhodes
Writer & Educator

Alongside her professional career in education, Chloe recently graduated from the Columbia Publishing Course in Oxford, UK. She is the voice behind Tuesday/Thursday Lunch Club on Substack, where she explores the everyday and the interior with curiosity and candor.

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