There is a season for everything in life. Some seasons are experienced more thoroughly or at more frequent intervals than others. I am facing a familiar sort of season in my life right now - one of change, to be very general - but am experiencing it in an entirely new setting.
I know that it is pointless to dwell on and worry about the future because it does not “add a single hour to [my] life.” (Matthew 6:27) This has been a constant struggle of mine throughout my life, which I have become better about recently; I have accepted my present circumstances for the way they are and I am no longer agonizing over the many unknowns. In fact, I am rather excited about the prospective future by leisurely imagining its possibilities, as opposed to fretting over exactly what in the world will happen.
In college, I honestly had no clue whatsoever as to what I would do or where I would go after graduation. During the first half of school, I didn’t worry so much, reasoning that I had plenty of time to figure it out and convinced it would “just come to me.” Junior year, as is typical for juniors, I panicked. Yes, I was one of the many who fell prey to the oh-so-common Junior Panic.
Halfway through the year, I found a passion for a certain fallback plan. Over the next year, I acquired a new passion, which surpassed the first, and my plan changed. By the time I graduated, the plan attached to that second passion, which was to teach English overseas, simmered away as I rediscovered that teaching is not my gift at all.
So there I was…a recent college graduate, my safety net and solid plans dissolved just as soon as I had managed to get out. No amount of planning or worrying about the future had done me any good. I was back at square one. I have found that you can plan your entire life and arrange your whole world, but that does not set your plans into motion. Anything can come up, rendering such things in life beyond your control.
This brings me to my current season. After plenty of worrying over the summer, I came to find myself in a place I never could have planned. Astoundingly, the Lord brought me everything I needed at exactly the right time and not a moment sooner. Experiences. Opportunities. Relationships. Finances. Passions. Ideas.
I am not yet settled and secure in the direction of my life. There are quite a few things that I am still experiencing, things I must learn before I may be solid in the sense of career and living situation. I find myself in a very sizable in-between stage right now, where nothing is sure, only infinitely possible. Nothing is predictable, only insecurely probable. There is no point in predicting anything, as there is usually something greater that comes along, seemingly out of nowhere, altering the entire situation and its previously assumed outcome.
I am no longer a part of the life I once knew, a life that was all I knew, and I am at a loss at the life I will have, even one year from now. It is a life in which nothing is secure, in which I have nothing to cling to for assurance but my Jesus. I feel the thin wire that my life lives upon right now. Its fragility. Its vulnerability. If He so wills, it could all fall apart and be gone, but He is the One holding it all together. Again, I see how I cannot be the one to hold up my life. I have no control. I have no power.
This period He has me in, I feel, is engineered specifically for the deepening of my reliance on Him and becoming exactly who He wants me to be. My focus has been narrowed to a handful of things that need a lot of attention, effort, and cherishing. I am planting now for the harvest so that I may be ready in those few, but important, areas when the time comes to move on from my present season.
As I am focusing on a specific few of important things right now, there are other certain elements of my life that have necessarily been put off to be saved for later. Things I miss to the point of inner struggle and things I thought I was ready to experience that I am really not ready for at all. Sometimes I feel like such a mess, so far from being prepared, that I wonder if I will ever be ready enough to experience some of those things. But that is another thing I am learning…not to worry, but to trust that I will be ready for whatever I am being prepared for, all in perfect timing and not a moment sooner. And it will be beautiful.
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