24 Oceans.

It was a number — just a number, just two digits that didn't have to mean anything but came to stand for so much.

It was 24, the jersey number of a basketball player who I wanted to be, the symbol of perfection, completion, a place I could only dream of landing.

It was an age where all the preparation and waiting would stop being, and the doing would begin. When I was 24, I would have my own magazine, I would chart my own path, and I would have my place at last in this world.

No. 24 has taken its hits in my life, but never so much as this year, when I turned 24 years old with the bullheaded expectation that nothing would keep me from making this a banner year. I would push and strive, connive and achieve, because 24 only happens once.

The funny thing about No. 24 is that it's an arbitrary number. The numbers 2 and 4 were never digits that resonated with me. I was more of a 3 or 7 type kid. And I don't know why my basketball hero picked 24, and why that had to consume me and become something. But 24 became 24, and so when I turned 24, it was time.

The year started well enough. I didn't see starting my own magazine reasonably happening, but I already managed a magazine (16-page, full color!) on my own, so that was close. Plus, I had the grand vision of jumping in the old Mustang and driving down to New York City, where I would wow the executives of Time Inc. or New York magazine with my ambition and work ethic to the point that they would give me some kind of amazing job. The year bore enough promise to fulfill its expectations.

Right before I turned 24, I was promoted at the job I had risen to from a mess of internships, freelance, and low-level full-time work. I became the night editor of a daily newspaper, which had me supervising the paper each evening and designing the front page. I got to send reporters scurrying, exercise news judgment, and make the whole thing markedly more respectable, with all my little quirks coming out on its pages, from taking care of the widows in the text to making packages that were far too effort-filled for newsprint.

Within a few months of turning 24 and running as hard as I could with that promotion, though, things began to change. I already loathed the company I worked at very much, and I had long dreamed of getting out of there. But amidst the crappiness of the job, the layoffs, and the turmoil of the industry, I thought I would be safe — at least until I could smell doom coming, and then I could take off and find a new home before anyone else.

But soon after that promotion, my distaste for the company was met with changes that even I, as a talented employee, could not stop. An unraveling began as the company changed some things, and threats emerged. One thing happened after another, with long hours bleeding into stress and disillusionment. The smarter you were, the more you flailed, for the company was bringing in new procedures meant to suit the bottom-feeders. I fought for perfection, the complete 24, and it started to break me.

Those months at the newspaper, when the company tried to implement a new system for building the paper (design, writing, everything), I found the answer to what happens when an immovable force (a caffeinated, 24-year-old go-getter who won't take anything less than perfect) meets an immovable object (a crappy company, or all the antagonists from Atlas Shrugged — you pick). The answer is tendonitis.

I had never heard of tendonitis before I got very scary, deep pains in my wrist near the tail end of us introducing a new system that was flawed, slow, and designed to kill people from the beginning. But now, whenever I hear of someone getting tennis elbow or a baseball player landing on the disabled list with fatigue, I feel great sympathy. Tendonitis blows.

Tendonitis is what happens when the elasticity that makes up the tendons and muscles wrapped around your arms starts to go. Rather than being taut rubberbands that allow your fingers and arms to react as if spring-loaded, your limbs become strung-out rubberbands, getting tiny tears and going limp. My tendons were so shot that I could rotate my arms around and hear the bones clicking together. I felt shooting pain at first, then it subsided to a deep ache, like when you've been punched a bunch of times and the bruise never goes away. It started in my wrists and worked into my elbows, then ran all of the way into my shoulders and neck.

Using a mouse caused shooting pain. Typing caused me to hunch over in pain. All of the day-to-day tasks you need to do to live — driving, getting dressed, washing dishes, picking up something as light as a shoe — brought gasps of pain.

I soon found that I couldn't curl my hands into shapes that I had used them in my whole life. It was one thing to not be able to cook or fold something, but considering I spent my life worshipping at the thrones of writing, drawing, guitar playing, basketball dribbling and shooting, driving, handiman fixing, and otherwise just doing everything on my own with basic ingenuity and hands that could figure out how to do anything, something more was quickly lost. I couldn't hold a pen. I couldn't write. I couldn't type. I couldn't design. I couldn't hold a book open. I couldn't draw. I couldn't turn a steering wheel.

I couldn't live.

Two months into what was meant to be the year that everything happened, the age that would define me, I could barely get dressed. The kid that self-righteously gutted through every horrible night at work had to tell her boss she couldn't keep trying. She couldn't keep moving that mouse with bags of ice wrapped around her arms. She couldn't be a freaking warrior, proving to the world that this was her time and place.

The details are bland now — the doctor's visits, therapy, ice baths, splints. Learning how to sleep. Spending weeks living with my parents because I couldn't function on my own. Reading more than 5,000 pages of books and magazines. Learning how to pray because I could do nothing else.

My company, which quickly realized that the very system it had implemented against many protestations and warnings was indeed crap, made the situation more Job-ian as time went on. On one return to my job, to tell my boss I was headed in to see the doctor but couldn't come back to work yet, he told me that he — a man who put up with an inordinate amount of stupidity and could weather anything — had finally had enough. He was leaving, and he wouldn't be around when I came back.

Then the company-wide emails came that explained that certain processes were moving to desks in Chicago. I came across this one day when checking my email from my parents' house. After I inquired, the editor of the paper explained that, indeed, I had just been laid off via email, prospective that summer.

As I sat and waited and iced my arms, the paper I had fought tirelessly to build up for a few months was being degraded daily, with me not even within driving distance of stopping the slide.

And so, at 24, I learned I was not God.

It's funny to write about it now, because I'm sure it seems melodramatic. I'd been dealing with all sorts of emotional upheaval, soul-searching, and general discouragement ever sinced I moved to Boston several years before. Life lessons and seeing Who God is were not new to me. But the culmination of my great expectations for being 24, coupled with my body finally cracking after years of trying to out-fight life, came in a beautifully ironic package over those few weeks.

I would have to write forever to describe the lessons I learned and how God pulled together the final pieces in the next few months to cap off journeys he had started for me weeks, years, and even decades before. Losing my arms began me gaining my soul, and it was something I couldn't have conjured up or seen, no matter the time I put into chasing joy and seeking God for so long. The lessons were wide-ranging, the fallen barriers all over the place. But starting with the days when I couldn't grip a pen, I became like the C.S. Lewis dragon that has to have himself ripped to the core before he can become a child again.

And today, about a month before a birthday that will forever sweep away my perfect 24th year, I am more whole than I've ever been.

As God usually does, He's already started redeeming the situation. If I had come out of that mess just knowing that He was God, and that I needed to chill out, and that certain things were worth living for, that would have been great. But He had me learn many more lessons, and see many more things. And then He started blessing me, as is His norm when we think all that's left is to thumb our noses at Him.

About a year to the day I got that masterful promotion, I was at a new job — a job I went to just to get out of that bad company as quickly as possible. But, it turns out this job was pretty good, too — to the point that I spent a night, a year after that promotion that I thought had solved everything, interviewing several members of the New York Yankees in the bowels of Fenway Park. I can explain why this is fantastic, but I don't think I need to. I asked to be a little god at a newspaper, and God broke my arms and gave me a one-on-one interview with Andy Pettitte, and then Derek Jeter (to name two). I think that makes my point.

So, with a month left of being 24, I sit and type with a twinge still in my arms but a smile on my face. I'm never going to be able to encapsulate in a blog post, book, or song what has happened to me in this 24th year, but I do know that somehow it has turned out exactly how I wanted.

I wanted 24 to be a year when amazing things happened, when I finally arrived, when life became worth living. And, in the true spirit of Mark 9, God has cut off my arms to bring me closer to Him.

I have joy for the first time in my life. I no longer wonder about my future or fear that I won't fulfill expectations. I work my tail off and get great results but am never shackled by perfection. I enjoy my days and the people around me, and I can say for the first time in my life that, through no ability of my own, I have finally seen how to walk with God.

So, don't be careful what you wish for. Wish for it, and chase it. But if you are the kind that has decided God will be part of your life, be aware that He keeps His promises, and He'll keep them whether you're following along or fighting Him with all your might. I have told Him many times over the years that I want Him, and this year He fulfilled my wish in the best of ways.

Could it have happened without pain? Could it have happened without feeling an inch from death and hopelessness many times over? Perhaps. (Especially considering I think most of the garbage I experienced was due to my own pride, not God trying to pull one on me.)

But I don't care, because I'm 24 years old, and God has done with 24 what I couldn't: He's made these otherwise meaningless numbers mean something very big. He's given me oceans to sweep away my hopes of castles in the sand and given me what I was looking for behind all of those empty requests: Him.

So, hello, 25. We shall meet in a few weeks. But when I set an agenda for you, be forewarned: It may look organized on the outside, with goals and plans that follow human norms, but its execution could be far different. For the picture I paint is not what I pursue — the deeper meaning behind is what I want.

After a year when God used what appeared to be the opposite of a great human experience to give me the best result I could have ever wanted, I fully expect my ideas of human advancement to be met with obliteration, and my heart to be taken forward in the same giant strides He's shown me this year.

I don't need to draw, write, eat, drive, dribble, play, and scheme to know God. He can have my arms any time.

And whatever things I feel so badly that I need this year to get somewhere or be someone, I probably don't need, either. There's not much that could happen now that would make me think I'm losing anything when God works.

24, after all, is just a number.

Galatians 6:9.

When I want to understand
People who are so different than me,
I watch the movies they love and listen to their favorite music with them.

In God, I find Someone so infinitely different than me, yet somehow the same.

We do not do good because God requires it,
Nor because it pleases Him.

We do it because it's just like when you discover
That you and a friend love the same song.
All that God deems "good" gives us a window
Into the head
Of a Being
Who is from a supremely different background than us.

When we learn to like His movies and music,
We find that we can know and love Him, too.

God loves music and art and movies and love, but above all,
He loves good.

And that is why we chase it, and do it, and love it.

In good, we are close to God.