Saw a school bus trundle down my road this morning. Which is major throwing me off because it feels like Saturday and in my early-morning stupor I thought, "Why the hell is there a school bus on Saturday, there can't be that many kids for detention already." When I signed on to my computer I realized that "Getting Started" weekend at my college begins today. And it suddenly hit me that, for the first time in nearly twenty years, I won't be going back to school this fall. I haven't been scoping out what color notebook I'll pick in the back-to-school aisle at work. I haven't packed up the shit I've packed for the past four years and loaded it in the back of my mom's Yukon to pile into half a dorm room. While this summer has just felt like a normal summer, today it is coming clear: I am officially a graduate.
Though I have found that I like working much better than I do being at school. Which is comforting because I was only a student for a limited amount of years, I'll be working until I die and I might as well like it.
I've been having epiphanies left and right in the past few days. I'm starting to view this period that I'm in as merely a pause, a redirection of my focus while I'm sitting still between decisions. And trust me, much is going on during this pause - you know that saying "still waters run deep"? But I've been putting all of my focus on my employment status. And really, I'm ahead of the ball game compared to a lot of people. I have a job. Whether I like it or not doesn't matter when I look at the fact that I'm becoming financially independent and bringing a little less than half of an income to the household Joe and I are about to start. (246 days, but who's counting?) It's certainly not what I had in mind after graduation - if I had gone with that game plan I'd be hating my life in a classroom right now and would probably be even more depressed than I am right now. Then again I didn't plan on planning a wedding and buying a house after graduation either, and look where we are.
My dad encouraged me to read a devotional book called The Disciplines of Life by V. Raymond Edman. (I've attached the link to an online copy below.) It's broken up into different sections on disappointment, declining days, discontentment, discernment, disease, delight, delay - altogether about 30 different "disciplines" (that all conveniently begin with the letter "d") that grow and develop us into the followers of Christ we are called to be. Most of the time I don't have a specific issue in mind when I randomly choose what chapter to read, but last night when I picked "the discipline of detail" I realized about halfway down the first page that it was exactly what I needed to read.
The chapter presented the structure of our lives much like the structure of a sentence. (How fitting for an English major.) Some are complex, some are simple; but all have a specific subject and specific reason. Edman likened the punctuation of a sentence to the direction of our God - commas being additions, parentheses being those unexpected moments of trial and difficulty that we could all do without, and periods being the finality at life's end, hopefully as a declarative statement rather than a question. By putting ourselves as the subject of the sentence, our purpose in life becomes very shallow and unsatisfying; whereas putting our God and His calling as the subject makes our existence as part of something much bigger than ourselves.
In essence, what we see is not all there is.
What I am at right now is a semi-colon - a pause in events, a turn of the head as I shift from one God-directed path to another. Edman offers the biblical example of Paul and Silas being called to Macedonia, only to be tossed in prison once they got there. There is no mention of them messing up along the way and so being imprisoned as punishment; it's just a hiccup that they encountered on their journey to do as they were compelled by God. Edman writes, "God's semicolon...means that He wants to change rather radically the course [of your life]...that He desires to enlarge its content, and not at all that He has cut you off from or forgotten to be gracious...The Lord is changing the direction of your life, not to close it, nor to constrain its significance within narrow horizons; on the contrary, He wants to make it broader, deeper, richer; and therefore He puts a semicolon after a given line of thought that you would have desired to have continued" (131-2).
This is no crisis at all. I'm not missing the point, and I'm not going astray. It's just a change of direction. This pause is teaching me to be patient, which I struggle with almost on a daily basis. And so I will wait. I say it with such conviction but I really don't have a choice. In the past I've waited as a matter of pausing until I heard my God's approval, but now it's simply out of...well, lack of choices. Which I guess is sort of the same thing: I'm holding off until my God fires up the spotlight and says, "Here, do this thing." Supposedly the journey is more important than the destination, and it's a good thing because right now all we are is journey, I see no tangible destination. So at this point I'll turn off the car, grab a cold Coke, and kick back until the GPS gets its shit together and gets me back on the road.
You know a little earlier when I said I was depressed? I'm actually not. I tell you right now, I have never been happier than I am right here in this moment. I am physically able to go to a job every day and provide for my future, even if it's not as much as I'd like it to be or doing what I want to do. I have made it a point to use my passion for writing as much as I can, refreshing my soul every single day. I am making the most of the time I have left living in my parents' house, where I have deep breakfast talks with my brother and share coffee with my dad in the living room and cook dinner with my mom and talk to my sister across the hallway while we're getting ready in our rooms. I get to see the love of my life every day and I am counting down to the day when I become his wife and start a life with my best friend. And while I've had my fair share of griping over my current situation, I know that this pause is merely preparation for something else. This is the training ground where my patience and my trust in a bigger plan are growing leaps and bounds day by day. And that, dear friends, gives this whole phase a much bigger spin.
If you're interested in reading Edman's book (which I would highly recommend), you can find it here: http://www.ccel.us/disciplines.toc.html
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