Sunday started with church and ended somewhere around midnight with me still staring at a purple star.
That sentence probably tells you more about my current life than I intended.
I got ready for church, helped set up the camera, finished around nine, and then apparently decided my brain no longer needed an off switch. I had been working on a logo design, so I opened Procreate and started drawing.
And drawing.
And adjusting.
And designing.
Even during church.
Yes, I know.
While our campus minister was teaching from the book of James, part of my brain was listening and another part was mentally rearranging curves, lines, stars and shades of purple.
Not exactly my finest example of being fully present before God.
Eventually, I put the designing aside long enough to join some girlfriends for lunch. We were celebrating our friend at Breakfast Republic in Culver City, and what was supposed to be brunch became one of those wonderfully long meals where nobody seems particularly interested in leaving.
We talked.
We laughed.
We caught up.
We apparently took the name Breakfast Republic seriously enough to establish temporary residency.
By the time we finally left, the restaurant was closing.
I came home, finished my homework, checked my Roam Light website again, made sure the links and everything else I needed were where they were supposed to be, and finally finished the assignment.
Then I returned to the logo. Of course I did.
By the time I stopped, Sunday had practically packed its bags and Monday was standing at the door.
But somewhere between church, lunch, homework and my Procreate marathon, two conversations stayed with me.
One was with a male friend at church who told me he thought he was going through a midlife crisis. The other happened around that table with women.
And together they made me think about something much bigger:
When did we decide there was one correct timeline for a successful life?
The Midlife Question
When my friend told me he was experiencing a midlife crisis, my first instinct was to think about perspective.
I told him that prayer has helped me tremendously during periods of restlessness.
But later I wondered whether I had thought deeply enough about what he was saying.
Maybe what we casually call a “midlife crisis” isn’t always a crisis.
Sometimes it may be an inventory.
You reach a certain age and start looking around.
Is this where I thought I would be?
Did I choose this life, or did I simply keep moving until I arrived here?
What happened to the things I wanted to do?
Is there still time?
Those aren’t ridiculous questions. They’re human ones.
Søren Kierkegaard wrote, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
That’s the uncomfortable thing about living. We don’t get the completed map first.
We make decisions with the information, maturity and circumstances we have at the time. Years later, we look backward with knowledge our younger selves never possessed and wonder why we didn’t choose differently.
James gives us another perspective:
“Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.”
James 4:14
That verse doesn’t make me want to panic about time.
It makes me want to respect it.
There is a difference.
I don’t want to spend the years God gives me grieving an imaginary version of my life so intensely that I fail to live the real one.
Around the Table
Lunch that afternoon gave me another perspective.
There we were, a group of women talking, laughing, celebrating a friend and catching up on life.
And I started thinking about how many single women I know.
It seems as though there are more single women now than there used to be.
So I wondered:
Is that actually happening, or does it just seem that way because of the women around me?
The answer is complicated.
American adulthood has changed dramatically. People are marrying later than previous generations, and many remain unmarried longer. Among adults ages 25 to 29, for example, only 29% were married in 2023, compared with 50% in 1993. Yet delaying marriage doesn’t necessarily mean rejecting it. In the same research, 69% of never-married young adults said they still wanted to marry someday. (Pew Research Center)
That’s an important distinction.
Wanting marriage and refusing to build your entire life around waiting for marriage are not the same thing.
Women Have More Choices Now
Women today have opportunities previous generations of women fought very hard to obtain.
We can earn our own money.
We can pursue education.
We can own property.
We can travel.
We can build careers.
We can create businesses.
We can live independently.
We can decide whether a relationship actually adds something healthy to the life we already have.
In 2024, 49% of employed American women age 25 and older had at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 41.3% of employed men. Before the mid-2000s, the pattern went the other direction. (Bureau of Labor Statistics)
Financial independence has changed too. Pew found that in 2022, households headed by unmarried women without children under 18 had median wealth of $87,200, roughly comparable to unmarried men’s $82,100, although age differences explain some of that similarity. (Pew Research Center)
None of this means women no longer want love.
Recent research says otherwise. In 2025, 63% of never-married non-LGBTQ American adults under 50 said they wanted to marry someday. (Pew Research Center)
What has changed is that marriage is no longer the only available blueprint for building an adult life.
And maybe that changes what women are willing to accept.
Marriage Should Add to Life, Not Rescue It
I am single.
I am also content.
Those sentences can occupy the same paragraph.
Would I be open to marriage? Yes.
Do I believe I need marriage before my life becomes meaningful?
No.
There’s a difference between wanting someone and needing someone to prove that your life turned out correctly.
And perhaps this is part of what has shifted for women.
If I can support myself, nurture friendships, serve God, travel, create, write, learn, laugh, build projects and pursue things that matter to me, then marriage isn’t arriving to rescue me from an unfinished existence.
It would be someone joining a life already underway.
That changes the standard.
I don’t need someone merely to occupy the role marked HUSBAND on society’s checklist.
I would want a relationship in which two people make each other’s lives richer, stronger and more purposeful.
Research also shows why some women may be selective. Even in opposite-sex marriages where husbands and wives earn roughly the same amount, wives spend more time on caregiving and housework while husbands spend more time on leisure. (Pew Research Center)
That’s not an indictment of marriage or men. Plenty of marriages are loving, equitable partnerships.
But it does make one question perfectly reasonable:
Does this relationship make both people’s lives better?
That’s a much healthier question than:
Am I getting too old to be single?
Singleness Is Not God’s Waiting Room
I think Christians can sometimes make this unnecessarily difficult.
We talk about singleness as though God has temporarily placed someone’s real life on hold.
“Your person will come.”
“God is preparing someone.”
“Just wait on His timing.”
Those statements may be offered lovingly, but they can accidentally turn marriage into the prize at the end of faithful singleness.
What if marriage isn’t the reward?
What if God is already doing something with me now?
Paul wrote:
“I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances.”
Philippians 4:11
He didn’t say he learned to tolerate his circumstances until God replaced them.
He learned contentment inside them.
That’s very different.
My life isn’t sitting at Gate 47 waiting for Husband Airlines to announce boarding.
I have places to go.
Sunday Exposed Something Else
Here’s where I have to turn the mirror back toward myself.
If I’m going to argue that life is happening now, then I also have to ask whether I’m actually present for it.
Because Sunday morning, technically, I was in church.
Mentally?
I was inside Procreate which bothered me.
The project matters to me. The logo matters because it represents something much bigger than a drawing. I want to get it right.
But there is a point where dedication turns into preoccupation.
I don’t want to become so consumed with creating something meaningful that I miss meaningful moments happening directly in front of me.
Jesus asked:
“What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?”
Mark 8:36
Most of us aren’t trying to gain the whole world.
Sometimes we’re just trying to finish the logo.
Or the assignment.
Or the website.
Or the next project.
Or the next goal.
But the principle still reaches me.
My attention is part of my life.
Where I continually place it reveals what I am actually living for.
Mary Oliver asked one of the most uncomfortable questions ever put into a few words:
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
My answer cannot simply be:
Stay busy.
Maybe We Need a Different Definition of a Full Life
Perhaps that’s what tied my entire Sunday together.
My friend was wondering whether something was missing from his life.
I was sitting around a table with women whose lives didn’t necessarily fit an old-fashioned checklist.
And meanwhile, I was rushing from church service to friendship to homework to website building to creative work.
Different lives.
Different questions.
Same underlying issue.
What makes a life full?
Maybe we’ve confused full with completed.
Married.
House.
Children.
Career.
Retirement.
Check. Check. Check. Check.
Congratulations. You have successfully completed Adulting™.
Except human beings don’t work that way.
You can check every box and still feel restless.
You can leave several boxes unchecked and wake up grateful.
You can get what you once prayed for and discover that it requires enormous sacrifice.
You can lose something you thought you needed and discover that God can build an entirely different life around the empty space.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Life is a journey, not a destination.”
And faith makes me take that even further.
My life isn’t simply a journey toward the things I want.
It is a journey with God.
That means there are seasons I wouldn’t have chosen that still have something to teach me.
There are detours that aren’t failures.
There are unanswered prayers that aren’t proof I’ve been forgotten.
And there are beautiful things happening right now that I will miss completely if I spend all my time staring at the life I haven’t lived.
Soul Insights
1. A life can be unfinished and still be full.
I don’t need every question answered before I can call my life good. There are things I still want, places I still want to go, dreams I still hope to fulfill and relationships I remain open to experiencing. Wanting more doesn’t cancel gratitude for what already exists. I can hold hope in one hand and contentment in the other without forcing either one to disappear.
2. Restlessness deserves examination, not immediate obedience.
When something inside me says, There has to be more than this, I don’t necessarily need to blow up my life. I need to ask where that feeling is coming from. Sometimes restlessness exposes a neglected dream; sometimes it exposes comparison, exhaustion, fear or an expectation I inherited from somebody else. Before changing everything outside of me, I need to bring what’s happening inside of me before God.
3. Singleness is a relationship status, not a life diagnosis.
Being single tells you whether I currently have a romantic partner. It doesn’t tell you whether I am loved, connected, fulfilled, lonely, joyful, successful, struggling or growing. Those things require an actual conversation. We do people a disservice when we reduce the complexity of someone’s life to whether another person is standing beside them.
4. Independence doesn’t eliminate the desire for partnership.
A woman being capable of building a life independently doesn’t mean she is opposed to sharing it. It simply means partnership can increasingly be chosen for companionship, love, shared values and mutual growth rather than basic survival. That raises an important question for everyone, not just women: What kind of partner am I becoming? Finding the right person matters, but becoming someone capable of building a healthy relationship matters too.
5. Presence may be one of the greatest forms of gratitude.
Sunday reminded me that I can appreciate my life intellectually while still racing through it mentally. I can sit in church thinking about a logo, eat dinner thinking about tomorrow, finish one project while mentally opening the next five tabs. Gratitude asks something harder of me: Be here. I don’t want to spend so much time building my future that one day I look backward and realize I was rarely present for my own life.
Final Thoughts
Sunday didn’t contain some dramatic revelation.
It contained church cameras, a sermon I should have listened to more closely, Procreate, purple lines, girlfriends, brunch, homework, a website, dinner, conversation and far too many hours staring at a logo.
Basically, life.
But maybe that’s exactly where God keeps meeting me.
Not after everything is resolved.
Not when every project is finished.
Not when I’ve reached every career goal.
Not when I’ve traveled everywhere I want to go.
Not when someone puts a ring on my finger.
Now.
My friend’s question about midlife made me think about how easily we can look backward and wonder whether we have lived correctly.
The women around the lunch table made me think about how differently adulthood can look from one person to another.
And my own distracted Sunday reminded me that there’s another danger entirely:
I could spend so much time wondering whether I’m living the right life that I forget to actually live it.
I don’t know exactly what the rest of mine will look like.
I hope there are more countries.
More writing.
More friendships.
More ridiculous three-hour lunches.
More projects that begin with, I have an idea…
Hopefully fewer nights arguing with Procreate at midnight.
And yes, perhaps marriage.
I’m open to what God has for me.
But I refuse to treat today as the opening act for some supposedly more important life coming later.
This is my life.
It’s already happening.
And I want to be here for it.
Your Turn
Have you ever looked at your life and wondered whether you’re “behind”?
Maybe you’re single when you thought you’d be married. Maybe your career took a different direction. Maybe you’re questioning choices you made twenty years ago. Or perhaps you’ve achieved the things you were supposed to want and discovered you’re still asking, Now what?
Take some time this week and ask yourself:
Am I grieving something I genuinely desire, or am I grieving a timeline I was taught to expect?
Then ask one more question:
What is already good in my life that I’ve been too distracted to fully notice?
Write it down.
Thank God for it.
Then go live it.
Your life isn’t waiting to begin.
Neither should you.
© 2026 Amelie Chambord
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