Well here we go again

Alright, so for what seems like the umpteenth time, my plans have fallen through.

I am no longer going to Sicily due to visa problems.

The thing is, I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do now. Here I sit, a college graduate living at home with no job and no prospects to speak of. It's hard not to feel like a failure.

Everyone expected, and to a large extent still expects, me to go to med school. Over the past year and a half, I have come to realize that I have very little desire to actually do that. Thus began the search for what I do want to do/what God wants me to do, since I'd much rather be doing that than anything else. It has been one big jumbled mess and it seems like every time I think He's starting to lead me one way, that door slams in my face. Teach for America, GradWorks, Sicily, ministry with my friend's family in Germany. Every time I look for a new backup plan, it falls through.

What I have discovered through this, though, is that sometimes I am entirely too passive and sometimes I am entirely too proactive. The proactive part comes in with me saying "Well God, I'm not getting anything from you right now either way on this decision, so I'm going to just move forward with this."

Nice try.

It wasn't as though I was trying to move without God's direction, I was just trying to ascertain His direction on things in my own time. I should have realized that not hearing something from Him essentially means don't move forward (yet).

So, instead of trying to muddle through things myself, I am going to try to wait patiently until God actually moves to direct me one way or the other. I have a sneaking suspicion (don't you hate those?) that if I just let things be, not moving forward on anything, that somehow something will just fall right into my lap. Because anything I put together will just fail again.

Following that little speck of light. . .

So all year I've been trying to figure out what exactly I'm going to do after I graduate. Graduation is now exactly two weeks away and I still have no clue. Scratch that. I have clues of what I'm not going to do. For example, I am not going to be part of Teach for America. I applied for it, was totally set on going, had an interview with them, felt that this was definitely the way God was leading me, and then was rejected from the program.

Have you ever heard the idea that God doesn't tell us what to do next, He just gives us a little stepping stone of light (I've always thought of them as spotlights, but I guess that's rather vain now that I think about it) and we have to just keep stepping onto the next little stepping stone of light that pops up? Well, I kind of feel like all year I've been waiting for that next little stepping stone to appear so that I can step into it, but it never showed up. It's as if the stage manager forgot that cue.

I know that that's not exactly the way it works and I have been proactive about things (heck, I applied to Teach for America, have an application in with the Church of the Nazarene to join Mission Corps, and will probably apply for a Discipleship Training School with Youth With A Mission within the next few weeks), but how exactly DOES it work.

And I'm not even sure I completely buy this whole "God has a detailed plan for your life"/Jeremiah 29:11 thing anyway. I mean, what about women and children who are raped and murdered? Was that part of God's plan for them? I don't think so.

Sometimes I wonder where God seems to be leading people just before they die. I know that's pretty morbid, but I'm sure they had plans for their life and probably felt that God had plans for them too. A girl from my high school died of meningitis right before I started my freshman year there. She had just gone to Mexico on a community service trip for a few weeks and was planning how to organize a group of girls from my high school to go down again to really get involved in the Chiapas community. And within one day she was gone.

I'm not wondering if my cluelessness on this issue means I'm going to die soon. I mean, I could, but that kind of wondering is rather pointless and probably counterproductive. What I am wondering is, I guess, the age old question of what I'm going to do with my life. I'm not content to just get a job, eventually meet someone, settle down and have a family. Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that route, it's just not for me. I want my life to have adventure and significance (though I guess my saying that implies that the previous description doesn't have those and devalues it). But most of all, I want God to be in total control. I feel this call to ministry, but I have no idea what that will look like because I don't really feel called to preaching or pastoring, and certainly not seminary. I've always felt called to missions, but again, that's such a broad area that it could be anything.

I guess I've always had an idea of where I'd be for the next few years. Even when I didn't know where I was going to college, I at least knew that I was going to college. Now there are so many possibilities stretching before me, I can only define where I'll be three months from now by where I'm not going to be. Is it asking too much to have a little bit of definite-ness for the next three months?

But this I am grateful for: I can stay in San Diego for the summer with people from my church if I have no job or place to live. That almost calls for a post on what it means to be the Church, except that that would have to be a series. A very long series. . .