Answer

What If My Life Isn't Going the Way I Expected?

You may have pictured your twenties going a particular way — mission, marriage, children, a settled job, roughly on schedule — and found yourself somewhere else entirely. Watching friends move into seasons you hoped had arrived by now is genuinely painful.

Your life has not lost its purpose. It has lost its schedule, and those are different things. The schedule was mostly assembled from other people’s lives anyway, and none of it is doctrine. What is doctrine is that you were a son or daughter of Heavenly Parents before any of it, and that becoming like Them is the assignment. That assignment is running today, in the season you are actually in.

Eternal Truths

Your identity was settled before your circumstances were. The Family: A Proclamation to the World teaches that each person is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents with a divine nature and destiny. That was true before the plans changed and it is true now. Nothing on your timeline can reach back and alter it.

The plan is longer than a lifetime. In Alma 40, Alma teaches his son about what happens between death and resurrection, because the questions his son was asking could not be answered inside mortality alone. Every prophetic promise about family blessings has been made with that horizon in view. Blessings that do not come here are not blessings withheld.

What Can Make This Confusing?

Comparison is doing most of the damage, and it is the least reliable measure available to you. You are comparing your interior to someone else’s exterior, on a timeline neither of you chose. The related trap is when something temporary starts defining you. “Single” is a circumstance, not an identity. So is “between jobs”, “childless”, “still figuring it out”. They describe where you are standing, and the longer you stand there the more it feels like a description of you rather than of the ground.

Questions to Think About

• Which parts of my expected timeline did I actually receive from God, and which did I absorb?
• Is there a temporary circumstance I have started treating as a permanent fact about me?
• What could I build into this season instead of holding it open?

What You Can Do

Build belonging now rather than later, when the missing thing arrives. Choose one relationship this week — a ward, a friendship, a sibling — and invest in it as though this season is your life rather than the waiting room before it. People who wait for a life to start before investing in one usually find the waiting was the part they lost. If you want the fuller treatment, the essay behind this answer goes into it at length.

Jesus Christ is at work in the season you are actually in, including the parts that feel like nothing is happening.