Of Fire and Forge

Why I think that missing part of the story makes our 20's some of the hardest years.

I genuinely hate complaining. My goal for this is not to complain or request pity. Simply, my goal for this blog is to discuss some of the difficulties that I've encountered in my life and the reason why I think that is. Maybe, just maybe, this will be helpful to someone else.

Recently, life has been much harder than I thought it would be. It has been harder than I think it ought to be. I've started receiving paychecks from my first real “big kid” job after college graduation. I'm in a great apartment, in a beautiful part of town, in sunny, Southern Arizona. I'm meeting great people and feeling extremely fulfilled in what I do. So how can my life be tough? It's tough because I'm still living paycheck to paycheck. That's not because I’m not being paid well, because I really am, or saying that I'm not using my money as wisely as possible. My wife and I still have food on the table, and we can pay our bills, on time, without worrying about how we’re going to survive the rest of the month. But that's about the extent of each paycheck. And it feels hard.

It feels hard because part of me says, "It shouldn't be this way." I've busted my butt getting through college, I worked two jobs, I would come home very late from a waiting job that I despised, and I earned a good life. I look back at my parents and I see how life has treated them. Neither of them works particularly lucrative jobs, but we had all we needed. My parents saved and could afford things that they wanted. It makes me wonder why life can’t be like that. My struggle is that I missed over half of their story, and I never cared to learn it.

Just recently, I listened to a really great podcast. It was (and here's how incredibly nerdy I am) about a chair. Emeco makes a chair for the navy that is made of aluminum. You can listen to the podcast here if you’re a nerd like me. This chair goes through 77 steps in the creation process. Some of these steps are incredibly difficult, and really put the beating down on the chair. It goes through a lot, but at the end of the process, it's tougher than steel. The creator showed how enduring it is by throwing it out the window of an 8 story building and letting it bounce down on the pavement below. It came out completely unharmed. It could endure this because of all the turmoil the aluminum had gone through previously.

Everyone goes through the tough stuff. That's a part of life. It's a part of life that we love in stories and movies. When we encounter a great story about a hero, we want to see them endure hardship. We want them to endure difficult times and encounters because that's the only way that they will grow to become the hero that we need them to be. Luke Skywalker wouldn't have been able to destroy the empire if he didn't lose his family and his hand. Frodo Baggins wouldn't have saved Middle Earth if he didn't first go through his encounter with the giant spider. Heroes, at their core, have to endure a great struggle before they can actually be considered a hero. Why is this? Because all of us have encountered great struggles. Whether it's seasons where we don't know how we'll make rent, a time where family members die unexpectedly; we go through difficult times and we want our heroes to be relational to us. The only way we get better or stronger is by enduring, and it's the same for chairs and heroes alike.

Now, I want you, for a second, to imagine every story you've ever heard about a hero, and I want you to think of how you would imagine life, and difficult situations, if there was not a single hero that had tough circumstances. If every story you read started at the end and discussed how great the hero's life now was. If every story you were told only presented the happily ever after. I think you would feel wronged when you encountered hard times. You would feel personally victimized because you had not seen anyone else go through these tough situations. Herein lies why I, as well as many 20 somethings, feel personally wronged that we are having to live paycheck to paycheck. My parents and I'm assuming many parents, had a season in their early 20's where they were not financially secure in the least. They had years of uneasiness and years where they didn't know how they would secure dreams of retirement and owning a home, but I missed that part of the story.

As a general rule, by the time a child has the ability, or the care, to recognize financial situations, their parents are already close to secure. That was the case for me and my parents. When I was going into high school, I could finally start to pay attention and care about how my parents were doing financially, and by that point in their lives, they were doing pretty good. They were doing well because they had endured a lot of years of far less. But, I came into the story really close to the "happily ever after" part. I missed the tough part and never really learned about it. I had missed that part of the story in the lives of my friends and their parents, as well.

So now, I thought, "Well, college was really hard, but that was my tough part of life. So where is my 'happily ever after'?" This is why it's hard for many 20 somethings that you'll encounter. We're looking for a "happily ever after" that we think we have coming our way because we never heard the stories of endurance. We rarely heard about the times where mom and dad lived in a small apartment and never ate out because they couldn't afford it. We never heard the details of how a car broke down and they had no idea how they could get it fixed.

I know that this season is good. It's hard, but it's good. It's worth it. For chairs, for people, struggle builds endurance. When metal needs to be perfected and changed from one thing to another, it endures the heat and pain of a fiery forge. It's here that it gets melted down, beaten, and shaped into something far more than it ever could have been if it had avoided the forge. This season, this time of trying to figure things out, and going through difficult times is changing me from a boy to a man. I'm realizing that I will be supporting my wife and myself and there are no safety nets. We will endure, we will learn to be self-supportive, we will learn the hard way that our resources are finite. Through this time, I know that I'll come through tougher, and wiser; and I know that you already have, or you soon will as well.

#life #culture #money