The Question

Well, it's about that time of year again. The time when my current "gameplan for life" runs out, and I have to start discerning what my next steps should be. It's a time that I've grown to see as both exciting and nerve racking... since this is now the 6th time in five years that I've gotten to undergo this little transition from one plan to another.

Looking back on the past years, I honestly have to say that I'm pretty amazed with how lucky I've been to live out so many incredible experiences. When I first started staring out at the sea of the unknown "real-world" during my senior year of college, I could NEVER have guessed what the future held. In order of address changes, I've lived in Atlanta, Lorena, Tyler, New Orleans, and now Austin - with a total of eleven different roommates (excluding my family). I've tutored students and coached basketball at an inner-city high school in Atlanta. I've organized disaster relief efforts in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. There have been intensely challenging and sobering moments -- like sorting homicide crime scene photos during my stint as a defense investigator for death penalty cases... and there have been absurdly ridiculous moments -- like when I drove a tractor while wearing a gorilla costume during my stint as a guest relations director at a camp in the middle of East Texas pine forest.

There have been nights of dancing to hip-hop, country, blues, jazz, and funk. I've hiked to the top of mesas in New Mexico and to the top of Stone Mountain in Georgia. I've cried many tears from seeing so much oppression, sorrow, violence, and despair. I've laughed for hours with the best friends a girl could ask for. I've ridden a tap-tap in Haiti, played games with kids in Mexico, skied the mountaintops of Colorado, and sang Cajun music on the swamps of the Gulf Coast bayou. All of this has come as I've simply pursued life to the fullest... never really mapping out what lay ahead, but trying to let God direct my path... and trying to learn more about the world and what my part is to play in it.

Certainly I have made mistakes along the way -- whether by intentional sin or merely naive mishaps. But I've learned from the mistakes as well as the victories - and, all in all, I wouldn't trade any part of the journey thus far. And when I look back and see how faithful God has been in taking care of me and teaching me and granting me the desires of my heart.. then I have a lot of peace in trusting His provision for the future. And yet... as always, there is an anxiousness that has begun to slowly arise lately as I feel the end of this course coming quickly, with no idea where I'm to turn next. I'll keep working at Halcyon for the next month and a half, and then I'll be going on our trip to Sudan for the first half of August. But after that?... No plan.

Well, there are some things that I do know. I'll still be living in Austin, and my roommate Linda and I have already decided that we're going to keep the apartment we have now for another year. (This will make the first time since 2004 that I've lived in one residence for more than 11 months!) But I guess the big thing is that I don't know what I'll be doing for a job, which means I don't know where my income will come from once I get back from Africa. I have faith that something will come up and work out - seeing as how it always has thus far. My bank account may have been empty during some of these transitions, but the right job has always started exactly when I needed it to, and I've never been hungry or unable to pay rent. (Well, in all honestly, at the worst of my financial instability, I had to ask my fam for $100 - but as much as I hated asking for that, it thankfully was still a relatively small amount.)

But in thinking about a job.. the seemingly ever-present question surfaces again of "What do I want to do?" I feel like at the age of 25, almost 26, I should have a decent answer to that question. But I really don't, and I'm probably less sure about an answer that I've ever been. Somehow, every year that I've experienced something new and seen more of life, I've become less certain of what career I'd like to pursue, at the time in life when it seems like I should be narrowing down my "field of interest". It's not that there is a lack of things that I'm passionate about. It's that there are SO many different lines of work that I think would be incredible, and feeling like I need to choose one to settle into seems so limiting. Of course, I've talked with many people about this and I know that I'm not actually in a position of having to choose what one specific thing I'm going to do for the next 40 years of my life. People change careers. They pursue one thing and end up doing something completely different. But the reality also is that if I'm hoping to do grad school next year, then I at least have to be able to pick which program I'm going to apply to. And as far work goes, any cover letter I submit is going to require me to say why such-and-such job fits into my long-term career goals. Thus, actually having some "long-term career goals" seems kinda necessary.

For years now I've been saying that I'll probably end up in education.. or social work... or full-time ministry. Any of those could still happen. As I think about the issues around the world that interest me though, fields like public policy and non-profit management are attractive too. Or I'll read BBC reports from journalists working in refugee camps or humanitarian aid outposts and I contemplate giving this whole full-time writing thing a real chance. And in the midst of all this dreaming about things I'd love to spend my lifetime doing... the deadline of August is flashing like a neon sign in my mind -- reminding me that somehow I'm gonna need to figure out something concrete before then, so that I can find a job and hopefully get a paycheck again by September. Perhaps I end up just taking some job that I'm not crazy about for this coming year while I decide some of this "long-term" stuff (though truth be told, I'd much rather keep serving coffee for another year than take a boring deskjob.) Plus my carpe-diem-suck-the-marrow-out-of-life philosophy makes me cringe at the idea of spending 40-plus hours a week doing something I don't think is worthwhile.

Who knows. I'm pretty assured that God will open doors when they need to open. And I actually believe that when all is said and done, that it's much more important WHO I'm becoming in all of this more so than WHAT work I'm doing. But nonetheless, employment is a key part of life, and so it's yet again a subject of much contemplation. I'm curious to see 3 months from now how this is all playing out...