ThirtySomewhere

When TwentySomeone was published in 2003, the question everyone kept asking Doug and me was, “So, are you going to write ThirtySomeone?” As we didn’t really know and couldn’t come up with a better answer to give, we sometimes said “maybe,” but more often said, “no.” Our reasons were simple (if not a bit juvenile):

• First, we both suffer from/aspire to a degree of “do the opposite” syndrome; that is, whatever the majority calls for, do the opposite. So, if the expectation was that we would automatically lock ourselves into another life stage book, we would do something different. That’s just how we roll.
• Second, we wondered if we could write a book that accurately applied to the thirties as we thought (and have since heard) TwentySomeone did. Maybe because we were just on the cusp of our thirties at the time (we were both 32 when TwentySomeone came out), we had convinced ourselves that surely the thirties must veer off into too many different directions to really be able to speak broadly about them.
• Third, we both were leery of getting pigeon-holed as the “life stage guys” as, believe it or not, we actually have some thoughts on other topics as well. We didn’t want to get marketed or packaged or commoditized as authors, nor did we want to get on some writing treadmill that had us working out words without any real thought, experience, or prayer behind them.

So we held off. We toyed with a few other projects. We lived life. Sensing the need for new voices of input and more education to pursue a calling of teaching and writing, I (Craig) made a significant life transition, moving my family from our home at the foot of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado Springs to a seminary apartment in the suburbs of St. Louis.

Though Doug didn’t geographically move his tribe from Norman, OK, his roles and responsibilities as an R.U.F. campus pastor continued to evolve and expand, so much so that the ministry he was leading looked very different from when he started, and he had to figure out where he fit into all that.

Our families were growing, our marriages were challenging (mostly because of us and our issues), and we struggled with the idea of making sense of any of it, let alone trying to write a book about it and position ourselves as “experts” of some kind. The timing didn’t seem right and, well, it wasn’t.

But it wasn’t just the timing that was complicated; it was also the subject matter. In our first book, we said the key question of our twenties was “Who Am I?”; hence the title, TwentySomeone. We wrote about our need to focus more on discovering who we are (and not so much worrying about what we do) so as to grow up and into our true identity as children of God.

But life is very different now than it was then. We aren’t in our twenties anymore; in fact, we’re not too far off from our forties. What, then, is the key question of our thirties, and what clever title can we come up with to really capture any of that?

ThirtySomeone just wouldn’t work, not because who we are doesn’t matter now (it does), but for the reason that answering the question has (or should have) implications. We’re still concerned with who we are (and increasingly more so with the matter of Whose we are), but we believe the question of our thirties is Where Is My Place?; hence the (tentative) title, ThirtySomewhere: Finding Your Place in a Decade of Possibilities.

All that to say, we’re going for it in 2008. Got any suggestions or connections for the book? Leave a comment or email me at cmdunham [at] gmail.com and let me know.

And pray.