I always thought my real life would start once I finished college. I would graduate, find a job and a place to live, get married, establish my career, and settle into a comfortable, happy rhythm of certainty and purpose.
I don't know where this idea came from. Scripture never promised it; my parents never advised me toward it; the recently married couples I knew never told me it had been their experience. But somehow, I got it into my head that I would figure out where I was going before I turned 22, and until I did, my life was on hold.
At no point was this feeling stronger than my final semester of college. So many huge life events lay ahead of me: graduating from college, completing my student teaching, passing edTPA so I could get my teaching license, finding a job and a place to live, getting married, officially starting my career. But until those things happened, I had to survive a seemingly interminable period of getting up at 5 a.m. each day, commuting nearly two hours round-trip to my student teaching placement, and planning a wedding while 2,000 miles apart from my fiancé.
During this time, I reassured myself that my situation was only temporary––so temporary that I could count down the days until it was over. Soon, everything would be all figured out, and I wouldn't have to feel anxious anymore. Life wouldn't be on hold forever.
Two years removed from that time in my life, however, I see that I was wrong to think that waiting was an activity reserved for college seniors. Even though I checked each of those items off my 2018 to-do list––some of them as scheduled, some of them on a different timetable than anticipated––I find many of those same questions once again on my mind.
When should I finish my master's? Am I going to be able to find a teaching job for the fall? Where are we going to live once our lease is up in June? How much money is all this going to cost? No matter how many times my husband reminds me that God is going to work everything out at exactly the right time without my worrying about it, I still feel a creeping anxiety when I look toward a future that, for me, is impossible to make out.
As I've been updating my resume and browsing apartment listings, I've begun feeling the strangest sense of déjà vu, as though I am reliving March of 2018. On a whim, I picked up the journal I kept during that semester and decided to re-read it. About halfway through, I came across an entry I had no memory of, and as I read, I was struck by how applicable my past words are to my present situation––and by how I've failed to continue grounding myself in the truths I believe.
I may feel as though life is on hold, but the reality is that right now, I am very much alive regardless of what is or isn't happening for me. The time I have is not guaranteed, but it is all the more precious because of its uncertainty. I may not be doing anything that feels important, but that doesn't mean this time is not worthwhile. What matters is not so much what important tasks I accomplish but the person I become in the doing of them.
This is what I wrote March 21, 2018. May it challenge you, regardless of what you are doing in this chapter of your life, to do the things that are of the greatest value.
March 21, 2018
God––
I know you want me to learn patience. Joy. Peace. Longsuffering. Faith. These things are always your desire, and you give me your Holy Spirit so I can grow them like fruit, that others may be filled with your goodness.
I can have patience because I know you are working on my behalf while you have me here in this stage of life. And I know you did not dump me at some bus stop in the middle of nowhere; rather, you are sitting here with me, holding my hand and softly telling me to notice the grass poking up through the cracked sidewalk, the sun peeking through the clouds, the slowing of the rain. Even here there is good, and you are teaching me to notice and thank you for it even though it is not the good I desire.
I can have joy because I know that, while my mood changes, my reality is fixed: I am loved by my Creator, and He has redeemed me to do what He created me for, which is to love Him and those around me.
I can have peace because you're here, but you're not just sitting here; you're working, acting, directing, writing my story, and it does have a plot; it does have a resolution. My Author knows what He's writing.
I can have faith because you are God and you tell me you are worth trusting and you prove it over and over.
And above all this, I can love. I can give of myself because this is not all me; I am simply giving of what you have given me. I have enough.