Standing in the clubhouse at the village town I live in now with my parents, I see young women with their 5 year old boys on bicycles and helmets riding by, and I look at the mom's faces to see how much older they are compared to me. The younger they are the more biting the sting of my situation becomes.
I thought I'd be a mother by now. I'm 28 years old, I don't have a job, I go to grad school at seminary, and I live with my parents for obvious reasons pertaining to the no job part. The thing about this is that I am in school, and my goal for being in seminary is an inward healing that I so very much need. My past has been a whirlwind of trying this and doing that and so many incomplete things. Here I am now, and as steady and strangely normal as this feels, it feels right. I get impatient, for sure, and I start to think I'm way behind and that I should get a job or date and get married, and all these other filler events that people do, but what are we all doing? Why are we working and marrying and having kids?
I know for me that it's a box I can check off more than anything else. To bring value to myself. However, I'm not getting anywhere with all these checks in my list of to-do items in life. Once they're checked they become trash. College. Traveling. Jobs. Dating. Beauty. What then? Why are all these good things not as good as they appeared to be when the box was unchecked?
This is where I stopped checking boxes.
Obviously my life list of things to do never got shorter, if anything they kept getting longer, but I had to stop. When did I stop? I stopped when I realized I didn't want to live like this anymore. I had a job at a medical office for 2 years, then I felt the recoil in me as I longed for life to be better than that. I moved to Nashville, got a couple of nanny and server jobs that kept the bills paid, but that too went flat. My gifts were nowhere to be found in those jobs, but the experience they both gave me were memorable. The community I made there was refreshing, and I have a few heart embedded friends from there to this day. Not to mention a couple of memorable bachelors that I dated there. Haha. Really only 2 though. Great guys. So then I made my way to Cambodia. Another guy. But also a time to be in an atmosphere of worship and study of God's Word. It fueled my appetite for the Word and I left early from the missions program because it got too hard for me physically. Cambodia is hot, dusty, lots of bugs, and very poor. I met some really awesome people while I was there, but it just so happened that I had to leave because I just didn't want to stay any longer. I was beginning to get sick more often and the weather and work was getting to me. I felt guilty and ashamed for quitting the program, but I also felt God's grace in such a potent way because of it. The guy I had initially met there just turned out to be wrong for me, but the whole situation worked out really well, and I saw God's faithfulness to me as His beloved daughter in the midst of it all. I came back home in this weird place of vulnerability and raw questioning.
I had stopped chasing my dreams since I quit my medical assistant job, right before moving to Nashville, although perhaps I had stopped long before then, too. I was in a stagnant place for a very long time. I don't even really know how long I had been numb, maybe since my last year as an undergrad up until Nashville? What is that, 2009-2012? Geez. 4 years man. Four years, the freaking span of high school all over again. That's what it was. 4 years of the most emotionally stunted time of my life, where nothing had much feeling and I was running my life into the ground. I was dying, and moving to Nashville was what revived my heart in some way. The change of scenery, friends, work, and city all helped me think more clearly, get out of the routine I felt trapped by. Although I was still in a lot of unaware pain, numb in such deep places in my heart, I experienced more of life because of the people I met there.
People. I never knew, in such an explicit way, how important people are. They're amazing and beautiful and profoundly efficacious to experiencing happiness. So where was I? Ah yes, now I'm back home, with my parents, and although my environment and city, friends and a lot of my routines are back the outcome is completely different. So different I'm almost tempted to say it's not the same at all, but the truth is, I am struggling to be back where I was with this new heart of mine. I'm back, as if I am going through the same obstacle course again, and all the memories of how I failed and got hurt feel scary and threatening, but they are just that, threats. So why am I here today, back here where I was during those 4 years of despair? I ask God now, why am I here now? Why haven't I checked off more boxes? Why am I living with my parents? Jobless. The only answer I seem to get is that I am right where I'm supposed to be and what God is doing in my heart is much more everlasting than what a million checked boxes would be. But still. I'm cynical about God's work and much more eager to get to the unchecked boxes because a part of me just wants to redeem those 4 lost years. Another part of me just wants to be like everyone else who's got a lot of checked boxes, regardless of the way and shape their heart might be in.
To me the list of things to get done and accomplish feel more important, but yet...the really hilarious thing is that I am inadequate for the list. I could start attempting it, but I know by sheer man power and ability that I wouldn't be able to get the list done the way I would want to get it done: marry a hot successful man, have 5 beautiful healthy kids, look hot, be healthy, write and publish books, and other seemingly productive things that are more vague than explicit (because that's how fantasy thinking is) but I'm also painfully aware that a lot of that I don't have much control over. So, at best, I'd probably get the list done in a half-assed kind of way, and I don't like that thought either. So I literally have no choice but to stop, thank God, because that's probably the only way God would get me to stop, fail-proof because He loves me too much to let me even have a chance at continuing after the empty boxes.
I didn't know it back then, and I'm only starting to see it now, but at a much deeper level of truth I just wanted to be genuinely loved, cared for and valued as a person, as me...whoever me was. Me, as I was just never made the cut, and so the checked boxes were almost like me becoming the me that would be loved, cared for and valued. Those boxes meant everything to me. Failing to mark them was so hard to handle because it felt like I was failing at being lovable, cared for, and valuable. I had these high standards for my life, and they were so high that I couldn't even give myself a decent chance at attaining them, they were sky high! For gods to accomplish, really. And I was no goddess at the time, not until God came and lived through me. I became more of my identity in Christ, but that didn't mean my list was now ready for me to take on. It meant God's list was taking over.
So I entered seminary with a heart like a bud, having emerged from the seed and soil of deadness, I feel like I've been given this opportunity to go deep within my heart with God and be about that. Be about my heart rather than about the list. Still, the old list hasn't gone away, it's like a sneeze on the verge of happening. It tickles your face and clogs up your nose and you just want to let it out, get it done with, and when you don't your head feels irritated and incomplete. That stupid sneeze won't come out and it's not like it will do anything significant for you if it does except for feel relieving. Your eyes water and it doesn't come, and you just get annoyed at yourself because there's not much you can do to help it happen. The old list is like that. Except maybe not. Maybe the old list has actual significant and detrimental consequences if it doesn't get done, such as having a job! True. So what am I supposed to make of this situation of not only wanting to get the list done, not having control of how to get the list done, but also feeling like the list shouldn't get done in a way where just getting it done would mean it was done?
Answer: Be right where I am. I am getting the new list done but I'm getting it done in a way where I have no control over when each box will get checked. The only indicator I have for the list getting done in such a way is my heart.
I'm more raw and real than I was during my 4 years in the wilderness. It's one thing to wander aimlessly without hope and with very little idea as to what is going on, to now be walking in an unfamiliar environment as an ambassador of love. There have always been people around me, but before I couldn't see them and they really didn't matter to me. Now I see them like lost bodies in an ocean. I'm lost too, but I've got this boat thing, and I'm pulling people in, because I was once in the same sea as a lost body just waiting for something to happen, someone to save me. I'm back from being rescued, and it's different this time. I'm at the same vast sea of lost people, but I've got a boat and every time I pull someone in the boat gets bigger. I have no idea where this boat is taking me, but I'm just pulling people in because they look lost. I'm not exactly not lost, cuz I'm still at sea, and there's no real shore in sight, but I've got a boat now. My heart has something different this time and God is using me as a vessel to lift others up in love. I have nothing to offer but love, and that was actually never on the old list. Haha. Ironically.
Loving others genuinely was never on my list, but when I say that the list is getting done I mean that I'm doing something else and the list is changing with what I'm doing. So I question myself and God so much when I notice this. How come the list is different and how do I feel about that? Sometimes I feel awesome and I'm enamored by how beautiful Jesus's plans are, especially when I see the faces of people light up, but other times I feel like something is wrong with me and the list needs to stay the way it always was because there's no shore in sight and this boat can only hold so many people before it gets crowded. I have my doubts and my criticisms for what God is doing or for what I'm doing, really. I start to think I'm behind and maybe I am, maybe I should be this or that by now, or more proactive or whatever other vague checkbox, but I'm not. This is where I am. When the list changes I change with it, and that's scary. I never loved people like this when I was getting the boxes checked, in fact when I had more I loved less. Maybe God has me here because if I wasn't here I wouldn't be willing to do what He said I should be doing, the greatest achievement in life is loving others.
"Now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love."
- 1 Corinthians 13:13
Jmegrey.
I still hope that 2 years from now I'll have more checked boxes to say "oh, but see in the end God gave me what I wanted so boo yah!" But I get the sense that 2 years from now a more grown me will just have more people in my life that I genuinely love. And no one loves as well as those who have nothing BUT love to offer. I pray that God has me here for such a purpose, if not I'm pretty lame, really. But if so, then no list of a million checked boxes will be able to outshine the rising star in me.
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