When Will My Life Begin?

OK, so...here comes something a little more lighthearted (though perhaps deceptively so). I am OBSESSED with the latest Disney movie, Tangled (which is now out on DVD, just for the record). Since I'm taking ethics with Amy Laura Hall, I'm supposed to hate Disney, but even though I'm starting to identify some of the complexes the classics left me with, Beauty and the Beast will always be my favorite movie, and Tangled threatened to upset it for a while there.

Anyway, the first song in Tangled is an upbeat, acoustic-guitar driven account of the life of a princess locked in a tower wondering, as the song is entitled, "When Will My Life Begin?" (Click here to listen to the original.) Within a few days of seeing the movie in theaters, I had learned the song on guitar and was considering the possibility of covering it, but I didn't really have reason to sing about candle-making and ventriloquy and brushing and brushing and brushing my hair.

Plus, the song was touching on something I've thought about a great deal over the past several years: seriously, when will my life begin? In middle school, I was sure high school was when my real life would arrive; in high school, I couldn't wait to get to college; and I finished college a semester early and drummed my fingers until graduate school started.

Now I'm in seminary, where I thought I'd be affirmed and built up, and although that does happen, I pretty regularly feel inadequate, uninteresting, and just plain behind. Did my life already start and I just missed it? How much longer do I get to play the "I'm really young" card? Will I ever really know if I'm living into God's will for my life? The answer to all these questions is "I don't know!" And so I modified the words to "When Will My Life Begin?" and added a bridge. Check out the video I posted on YouTube (which, to my happy surprise, has garnered quite a bit of positive attention from fellow Tangled fans)—the lyrics (and chords) are in the video description—and look for the hope in the confusion.