focus

My friend Christine and I were talking last night and she said something extremely profound and completely true:

"I think you just really want to have a plan and it's driving you insane that you don't have one."

Sometimes that girl sees straight through me like no one else.  She is in a perfect position to do it too because we are so similar but we only see each other about once a week.  So she knows everything but isn't sitting too close to the picture.  Bless her.

I wish I had a plan.  I'm trying to figure out how to live life without a definitive one.  And it's driving me crazy.

I finished Don Miller's book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years last night.  It was good.  Not as good as Searching For God Knows What.  That book changed my life.  And maybe this one will too, in time.  One thing I did get from it is that one way to start living a better story is to start living better practice stories... small goals that you can work toward and accomplish that help give you a taste for what your bigger story is.  My problem is that I have a hard time working details together if there's no big picture.  Literally, I get stuck in the work process, bogged down by the lack of vision.  And that's exactly what's been happening.  But God doesn't always give you the big picture.  So sometimes you have to help yourself out by setting the small goals you know you can achieve and just working toward those... I guess (?).

It just bothers me a lot because all of a sudden it feels like my story is a story of not having a story.  And we all want to have a story, a big-picture vision that is guiding us along, making life meaningful.  For the past 20 years, my story was of being in school.  That's a long time to be in the same story.  And then to make a sudden decision for yourself (last fall) to not continue in that story... well, it's jarring.  And then a bunch of other stuff happened after that decision.  Big stuff.  Life-changing stuff that I won't go into because you can go back and re-read my old posts.  I'd like to think that I'm on the precipice of reinventing myself.  And the thought that maybe I won't and that maybe there won't be another plan or I won't be able to go back to the original plan scares the you-know-what out of me.  But it's silly to think that there won't because there always is, even when we don't see it.   

(Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see... this is what the ancients were commended for).

It's like running.  I'll be glad when I can get out there again.  In the meantime, my story of running crashed into my story of healthcare issues and I'm off the road for a little while, much like my sudden decision to decline my grad school candidacy last fall.  And like the lack of school, the lack of running is driving me insane.

But overall, I'm mostly doing ok.  Mostly content.  Actually starting to be ok with being in St. Louis and doing what I'm doing and not being in Columbia and not being in school.  It's pretty great.  Which of course makes the larger picture even more hazy because I want to change but then get caught in the contentedness I'm starting to feel.  Awesome.  Let's be honest, it's a hot mess.  I just have to keep telling myself that eventually it'll all come back into focus.