progressions

Monday I cried all day. Yesterday I was optimistic and peaceful. Today I'm nervous and tired and a little sad and terrified of the future. It's not like anything's screaming, "I'm your perfect job!!!" right away.

Most of all I don't want to leave South Bend. I came here under similar circumstances to the one I find myself in now; except that then I knew no one but my roommate and didn't particularly give a damn about the area, and now I have ties that I don't want to see broken. In Meg and Phillip I have the closest thing to family I could ever want so far from home, and I have a good many friends. I have a lovely apartment (which I finally cleaned last night, and walking over washed floors free of dirt and cat hair is an unbelievable sensation) in a perfect neighborhood.

So I don't want to leave. Which narrows down my possibilities somewhat. And, with my exhaustion and post-traumatic stress from my current job, and my old fears of uselessness in anything not relating to academics, my confidence has plateaued into a dull, whatever sort of feeling.

I need to refill my medication.

But still, my whole world is open to me. I have this sudden, unexpected gift of freedom, and I need to know what to do with it. Once upon a time, there was a little girl who knew her whole future, who always had a plan. She was going to get married at twenty-one and be a high school English teacher. Then she shot certainty in the face and dropped the education focus of her major and decided not to go to grad school right away. She did things she never thought she could do. She left home and trusted God to guide her hands to carve a new life for herself in a land she had never seen. At some point she grew into me.

But she's still there, the planner, the detail fixater, and she's delivering large litters of kittens in her anxiety. There's no plan, she says. There's got to be a plan. Find a plan.

And I have no idea how.

But this is what it's all about, isn't it? Christ says not to worry about tomorrow (and adds one of the wisest things I've ever heard: Tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own). James writes that we must never say, Tomorrow I will do this and go there, because we can't know what tomorrow will bring. Instead we must say, If God wills it, tomorrow I will do this and go there. We have to bring it back to the source.

Just a month ago I was planning my Christmas vacation, and how I would spend the extra paycheck that Center employees get in December. I'll never get that paycheck. I don't even know if I can go home for Christmas this year, since any job I begin won't give me a week's vacation right away, or possibly even a few days' vacation.

And in a very gritty way, I don't even know if I'll have income in three weeks. Things have been pointing in this direction for awhile, and I wouldn't see it, because it terrified me beyond my ability to think about it. And today I have to think about it.

But good things have come out of it, even now when all is in flux and I can't fall asleep at night for panicking and I can't rest when I fall asleep for dreaming. I know who my friends are. I know the loyal ones, the ones who have come around me, some from unexpected corners, and surrounded me with practical support. And that is something I've always had extreme difficulty believing -- my faith has failed in regard to firm belief in the love of other people. Now, however, I know.

And I'm wiser in regard to the world of business and profession. And I know very clearly what I have to do. I have to go to grad school. That will take at least a year to accomplish. In the meantime, I suppose, any job will do. I just need to pay the bills.

I don't know why I've been running so hard for so long from the fulfillment of what I know is my academic destiny. The responsibility has frightened me. Sometimes, like Prufrock,

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

But I can't run anymore, I think. It's time to go to Ninevah. I've buried my talent behind the garage and run away to sea and hidden myself in the cargo bay; but I've been spit out on the stretch of sand where I started, and now I have to dig up the talent and take it to Ninevah. There are fires in my bones of what I need to say to the world, and lurking behind a desk hasn't helped me say it. Yet.

So it's time. I am frightened and tired and I have not quite heard the voice of God saying, "Go to a land I will show you," like last time. But I have heard him say, "Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you." I'm not quite sure of the implications, but there it is.

Walking beyond my vision. (It's hard.) But it's getting me back in touch with the real.