apologia

I've been thinking, the last day or two, about the choices I've made over the last four years, and why I made them.

From the first moment I set foot in my kindergarten class, I wanted to be a teacher. The shape of the teaching changed, evolved, as I grew, until I went to Grove City with a clear vision of myself as a high school English teacher. Without second thoughts I signed up for the double major in English and Secondary Education, and prepared myself to change the world. (This has always been the primary goal -- to change the world. Teaching was the vehicle to that destination.)

And then I hated the education part of my major. The academic aspect of studying literature appealed to me much more strongly than creating worksheets and grading tests. So I dropped education. Teaching took one more evolutionary step: I'd be a college professor, instead.

Until I didn't want to go to grad school.

That's where the conscious journey began, the knowledge of the wandering. Really it started when I signed off on the Education degree, and shut the door on fourteen years of certainty; but my senior year of undergrad, watching some of my friends apply for and achieve acceptances to graduate programs, stripped off the remnant insulation of adolescence and left me standing on some windswept plateau with no map but a voice in my head saying, Go to a land I will show you.

I think that was when my faith was strongest, and that due largely to idealism and inexperience. I'd had some pretty arduous tests, certainly -- watching the near-unraveling of my family, the near-death of my sister whom I loved best of anyone in the world -- but I'd seen God pull us "out of the mire and set us on a rock" and I had no question but that he would continue to care for me in my next blind step into the absolute unknown. I'd never had to manage on my own resources before; I'd never been in actual need. So even though I had no plans, very little money, and no prospects, I had faith and that voice in my head and with few qualms I helped my parents pack the U-Haul and I moved to Indiana.

I was excited as well as terrified. Within two weeks I had found two part-time retail jobs and worked those for nine months. I had no health insurance. I managed. I found cheap medical centers when I was sick. Looking back, I think I was insane. But God was as faithful as he'd promised, and when I couldn't cope with the hours and the drudgery anymore, I found a better job at the Center for the Homeless, working with infants and toddlers -- something I'd done a lot for my summer jobs, and, though having nothing to do with my degree, something I enjoyed.

I was terrifically blessed. I met Meg and Phillip through that job. I had a few harrowing experiences, and a lot of laughs. But the kids wore me out; and then I moved up to my job in Events, and then just under a year ago, my fellow coworkers in Development, whom I had grown to enjoy and trust, got rid of me.

That was the worst experience of my life to date. Then I was thrown back on my own resources, then I really had no promises, no guarantees, and then, for the first time, I experienced the frailty of the protection that being a good person affords. The Unsinkable Sarah Peters went under. I was alone, facing unemployment, and I couldn't understand why. (There's this great passage in Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury -- gorgeous book -- that describes, perfectly, my reaction to the blows of life. I'm Will Halloway. Injustice always takes me by surprise, always hurts and confuses me, always wounds me, and I never come quite to grips with it, never quite understand.)

But now I'm working a great job with people who have become a part of my family, I've sorted out a lot of things that needed sorting, and life is on a steady upswing. I didn't have to tuck my tail and slink home. I didn't have to leave my apartment. I have fallen in love with the upper Midwest. I'm coming, increasingly, to be centered in who I am. I'm growing consistently, and rapidly, in my faith. I'm stronger. I have learned to separate some of the wheat from the chaff in my relationships. I still have a long, long way to go, and the journey is almost all uphill (cf. Christina Rossetti), but I'm moving.

In all of those flux times, I still could have gone back to school. But it's only been a temptation when I've been backed into a corner and thought myself without options. The inclination to pursue a degree in English has waned so much since college that I don't think you could offer me a full ride and get me to go.

I'm happy where I am. I still don't know if it's where I'm supposed to stay, but for now, it's good, and it's where I'm meant to be. I knew that for certain, last night.

A long time ago, at the end of my junior year in high school, I was running neck and neck with a guy for Valedictorian of our class. Our high school offered weighted courses (so that, if a student elected to take every weighted class, s/he could graduate with as high as a 4.5 GPA), and he and I were just about tied (I was a teensy bit ahead). When it came time to sign up for our senior year schedules, I had a choice to make -- to take Organic/Biochemistry, which Nick was taking, and which was certainly weighted; or to take Publishing Seminar, our competitive yearbook course, which wasn't weighted at all, but which a lot of my friends were taking, and was ambitious in its own way, and from which I'd learn a lot.

I took Pub Seminar. I knew it would probably cost me my class rank. It did. Nick beat me out by one hundredth of a point. And it galled me, a little bit. He was popular (though not very nice; I had a lot of people come up to me that year and whisper viciously, "It should be you, you're nice, Sarah"); I was picked on and awkward and badly dressed and school was the only thing I cared about or did; but I loved Pub, and my classmates and my teacher, and they were a fantastic support system throughout the year, and I had a lot of freedoms to write articles and roam the halls during class hours without a hall pass and yank people out of class and ask them intrusive questions, and so I didn't regret my choice.

And a few weeks ago my mother called me to tell me that one of the kids in our home church, who is a senior in my high school this year, and who is taking honors English from my favorite teacher of all time, came home to tell his mother the following incident from his English class (his mother then passed it on to mine):

"All these girls in my class were crying about their class rank because they weren't as high as they wanted, and Mrs. C. stood up and said, 'You're looking at this entirely the wrong way. Eight years ago Sarah Peters made a choice. She could have taken an honors course and had the Valedictorianship, or she could have taken a course with no weighted grade that would have made her happy. She picked the one that made her happy, and she made the better choice, and I admire her for it.'"

And of course my jaw hit my chest when Mom told me this on the phone (having this woman's admiration is like having the admiration of Queen Elizabeth I, I wish there were a medal for it), but it also made me realize, since I'd been questioning my decisions, that these are the kinds of choices I've always made. I have a great mind. I would have done well in a graduate English program. But I didn't want it. It wouldn't have made me happy. Or satisfied. Or fulfilled.

Because I've always lived with an eye on the future. Someday I'll be great when --. My life is going to be perfect if--. When this finally happens then--. And I've had a hard time embracing the present. Embracing life. And what I chose to do, when I graduated college, was to build a life for myself, in the now. With nothing but my own hands and eyes of faith. Those eyes have failed from time to time, but God is faithful (as Scripture says, he cannot disown himself), and he's held his hands under mine when mine have shaken, and I'm building that life.

And I would rather have undergone all the heartache and uncertainty and suffering of the past three years than have read about it in a book. I would rather have faced what I've faced than written a paper on someone else's creative rendition of the same experience. It's not that study is meaningless, it's not that writing is bad (I would never in my life say that -- hello, writer!) , or that my friends who have gone on to study are wasting their time; no, they're fulfilling their own destinies and callings, as I'm fulfilling mine.

And in its way, this is my calling. I haven't wasted my time blundering around: Not all those who wander are lost. One of the things I believe in most strongly about life is the struggle, and I find it best in the field, where I am. Working a 9-5. Fighting with hospitals and insurance companies. Sitting in the animal ER with the cat. Pounding out my own taxes. Ulcerating over money. Loving and losing. Learning to stand up for myself. Battling depression. Switching meds. Bouncing from job to job till I find one that fits. Casting about for my ultimate purpose. Waiting for that word telling me I've found it. Listening hard. Hearing a voice that almost sounds like my mother's, early in the morning just as I'm coming out of sleep, saying my name.

Something amazing? This IS amazing. This is living on the edge, where the next wave might bring a shipwreck, or an enemy vessel, or an iceberg, or an island, or a strange country, or home. It's lonely as hell -- there are nights when I cry myself to sleep, wishing so hard for a warm body bigger than my ten-pound cat's in the bed next to me that my whole body aches -- but there are compensations of joy so intense it seems my skin's expanding with the pressure of my soul against it. Simple things -- the silhouettes of pine trees, irrigators and barns against the purple-blue wide-open Michigan skyline just after dusk. Daffodils "on a hillside like a wall of new TVs." The neighbors' lawn mower. Slips of the tongue when I'm arranging to visit Meg and Phillip and I tell Meg that "I'll probably get home right after you do." My boss's wife saying over dinner, "Sarah can do no wrong. Mess with her and you mess with us."

I wouldn't trade any of it for the most prestigious degree in the world. I'm looking at broadening my academic knowledge, though the field has changed to theology instead of English. But I'm still not sure, so I'd start slow. An evening class, next semester. Because I think the difference I can make, I can make outside of school. If school is where I belong, fine, I'll go. But for right now, I'm fine where I am.

It's been a long, hard pilgrimage thus far. But I've walked it myself, and I wouldn't go back and take any other path. Because it's brought me to where I am, and this is where I am supposed to be.