Friday, October 24th, 2003 - I Don't Know

This week has been a crazy time in the calmest sense of the word. I have spent quite a bit of time in thought; this has had some drastic results in the past, but this time it was beneficial. In essence, I took a step away from myself and looked at my life right now objectively. I looked at everything that has happened recently and is happening right now, attempting to make sense of it.

What I found, in short, is that I'm completely clueless. And I'm so excited about that! As you maybe can tell, I'm having a tough time putting all this thought gathering into words. That is part because I don't really understand what's going on, so as lost as you might be right now, that is how lost I am right now, too. Yay us! Hmmmm okay, I think this post is going to end up a lot longer than I thought it would be since I can't seem to explain myself very well. Let's try a different approach.

After this time of reflection, God has shown me more about myself (He seems to do that a lot lately). I can see many situations where I have been confronted with options, and I had to make a choice. I always want to choose what God has planned for me; I seek His will for my life before my own. But that is not how I have always responded - I seem to often make a decision, and follow it up with a prayer like, "God, I'm going to do this, and if it's not your will, don't let it happen; stop me from doing it."

This uses some sort of early childhood logic similar to the typical "but you didn't tell me not to do that, mom." "Mom, you didn't tell me to not break all the windows with a hammer." God has greatly humbled me with the thought of this analogy, for that is definitely not what He meant by a child-like faith. I imagine a daydream where God and I are like a dad taking his son to the toy store in the mall, explaining that he has picked out the best toy in the store. I, like a little kid, often run off to check out all the other toys that surround me, somehow forgetting the fact that my Father has not only picked the best for me but has also carefully planned and laid it all out to match every last characteristic of me and my personality.

So one of the things God has been showing me the most through this is that although I don't often struggle (yet I still do sometimes) with seeking His will in major decisions, there are still countless numbers of much smaller instances where I am apt to pursue my own endeavors. God is really lifting me up and encouraging me through the faith of an awesome friend of mine who was praying about a decision, heard God's calling, and made a big decision completely out of faith, not knowing exactly what will happen but trusting God to carry through. In Luke 14:25-27, Jesus explains that we must love Him more than our own families and even lives to be His follower, and to see such a reflection of that trust encouraged me immensely and also helped to culminate a lot of this thought process together.

I'm just going to start rambling off the different circumstances that have come up lately so that I can explain (hopefully more concisely) just what all God's been doing. I applied for a job at Best Buy near the beginning of August and have spent over two and a half months going through several interviews, paper work, phone calls, and pestering to get a job there. I have degressed from striving for a main position in the media department to applying for a seasonal position anywhere in the store to apparently disappearing from the "people to call" list to begin seasonal work. "We'll call you in the next couple weeks, and if you don't get called, give us a call." I have gone through this many times, and earlier on in this week I gave up on giving them calls back and tossed in the towel on the Best Buy job.

About a month ago, as I got more into a higher level Sociology class, I realized that what I want to do and what God has given me a heart for is not under the umbrella of a Sociology major, but a Social Work major (which they don't offer at UM Duluth). This has been another situation on my mind this week as I have already looked into possibly transferring schools once more. My choices involve Winona State (MN) or UW Milwaukee if I wanted to pursue a Social Work degree; also, I have the decision of when I would transfer - at semester or wait until next fall.

Along with all those thoughts came more thinking about whether to pursue Social Work or consider something in full-time ministry, or to just go to this one place near Chicago which is a combination of those two (which I heard about from a friend at Crusade here). On a more random note, I had a thought yesterday about my older sister who lives in and goes to school in Eau Claire. Just all of the sudden, I thought of her, and I missed her so deeply that I started crying. It wasn't at a decent hour of the night, so if she had been home, she would have been sleeping; otherwise I would have called her right then. However, my parents and younger sister are coming up this Sunday, and I think it is a possibility that my older sister may be coming as well. I hope so!

I think I've almost covered a half of the things that have been buzzing through my head, but I figure you get the point. On a side note, I've discovered that the cause for my great insomnia and inability to get to sleep very well is caused by my outlandish daydreams as I lie in bed awake at night. My imagination is so overactive and a lot of the people that I talk to in a single day get thrown together in a random chain of events in my head, and much of this late-night time is spent laughing at the incredible combinations my mind comes up with.

So my mind has been racing more than usual in the past week, especially the last 4 days. Now here's the good news and the main point of this entire email: God has been so faithfully by my side the whole time. My mind has raced off like the Supermarket Sweep showdown, but at every lapse in exhaustive mental strain I have been in sweet adoration at such an awesome Guy. It has been an awkward time in the sense that I have not experienced anything similar in the past.

This mental Tiddlywinks has been such a wonderful struggle for me. I would commune with God only for some little thing to send my mind wandering for long periods of time, but God didn't go anywhere and waited patiently for me to return my thoughts to Him throughout it all. He has somehow strengthened and taught me a greater perseverance through this "outta control" exercise, and I spent some amazing time just talking to Him (when He showed me all this stuff) earlier tonight. This situation has been different in the sense that I haven't been diving very deep into the Word (what I consider the avenue that God has most used for my growth) for the past 5 days or so, but I'm thankful that He is building me up in other ways right now.

I don't know if this has followed any coherent path or train of thought, but I'm going to add one last thing and close it out. I have had an awesome time really growing in discipline in praying for other people that I feel so strongly on my heart. Still, our most important job is to love God with all that we are, and other people come after that. So although I have already grown immensely more in love in Him the past few days, I'm taking tomorrow (Saturday) pretty much completely off from everything to spend with God and truly seek His will before mine in all these decisions.

Now that I remember why I'm spending tomorrow with God, I remember my original intent for this post. After all this thinking I have done, I realize that I have no clue where I'm going next. I have no idea what God has for me tomorrow or in 5 years. I always think of that one proverb that I don't remember the reference to, the "we make our own plans but God has our steps laid out" verse in Proverbs. I think it has a 16 or a 19 in it. I'm so excited to not be in control and not have to worry about making all the right choices. It has always come easy for me to not worry, yet I'm just extra excited about my cluelessness right now.

So tomorrow is a great day to pray about all these crazy things spinning around me, really focusing on being ever more real and intimate with God than before. I don't like to do this often; keeping an outward rather than inward focus helps me to be less selfish and more loving. Nonetheless, I need it, and some of my great friends have reminded me in the past that we always have to take that time out for ourselves every now and then, stepping away from our usual flow of things. Tomorrow is that day for me, and I'm so excited to let everything go even more completely. I can look at my past track record with decisions that I made and that God made... the results are unanimous.

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