Have Cheap Luggage, Will Travel

I don’t believe in accidents or coincidences or purposeless people. We were all created as individuals with our quirkiness for a reason.

My mother’s whole life is about her kids. When she was growing up all she ever wanted to be is a wife and a mother. She’s never said this, but I think that she only wanted to be a wife because the end result was kids. Everything revolves around me and my sisters in her life.

It can wearisome sometimes for me as one of the kids but I realized the other day why is has been so hard for us lately. My mom hasn’t had a job in her niche in a long time. She is a leader but not the figure-head-follow-me leader. She leads you as she is walking right beside you. Sometimes you might forget that she is even there which makes her an excellent trainer for businesses and she hasn’t done that kind of job in a long time which is why the overemphasis on us kids lately. She has no outlet for the stuff that she was created to do.

So what is my purpose? I really couldn’t tell you to tell the truth. True to my Google lovin’ self I googled, “What is my purpose?” First thing that pops up, “Do you feel like a looser?”…Maybe I should stop. Next thing that pops up, “Find your purpose in 20 minutes.” That’s not going to do it…Next thing, “Rick Warren’s answer to Purpose.” Okay, I really give up now.

Google didn’t help so I spent some time rummaging through my own knowledge library in my head. Things that I thought were important a year ago, even last week sometimes, are not important to me now. So what now…

I think I am at the conclusion that to understand my purpose or why I was created, I need to start with my creator. What does that mean?

The God I believe in is a personal God who cares about me as an individual. So for me to get to know Him is not within a book or study class but simply hanging out with him in the quietness of the morning, over coffee of course.

Maybe you don’t really believe in God or his plan for your life. Maybe you think we are all an accident and you believe that you will come back as a tree when you die. But in the words of Morpheus, My beliefs do not require you to believe, and that believing disbelief in your purpose won’t prevent you from discovering it, just as a lack of belief in gravity won’t prevent you from tripping.

A friend of mine at work had a panic attack last week at a conference. It was really unsettling to me because he has been one of several people at my job to have panic attacks in the last few months.

Most of my life I have griped about my jobs. The only job that I can think of that didn’t make me crazy was my 4 year stint as a sandwich artist that was housed in a local gas station. Even as I write this I am starting to realize what made me love it so much. It wasn’t the job so much as it was me. I was in high school but I was balanced in the things I was involved in. I worked a ton, but I had drill team. I did a ton of drill team stuff, but I had great friends. I hung out a ton with my friends, but I spent a lot of time making sure I had good grades. So I had balance in all things.

It is very difficult to have balance at Women of Faith and it only gets worse the higher you are in the organization. Now that I am older I am starting to see the bigger picture and that people are not always victims of “the man”. There is usually a well functioning system of abusers and enablers. At my current job, too much is asked of my superiors and they ask too much of me. The problem is that people never say no more. They just quit. Or have panic attacks.

When will it be enough? Well, I am not waiting for somebody else to yell fire. FIRE!!! I am on fire and I need help! I am not so sure that bitterness or a panic attack or a new job is not waiting for me down the road because I won’t say anything.

You guys can pray for me because I don’t imagine that this conversation with my boss will be a fun one. Maybe it just is what it is, but I guess it’s not very fair to not give my job a chance. I wonder how she will react. “Hello, I’m on fire. Can you help?” :)

My life is making me want to give up lately. I think that when you are young that you never think that 30 is a real thing. Maybe in my mind 30 was like winning the lottery. It only happened to people on TV but would never happen to me. Turns out I was wrong and it looks like 30 will come if I like it or not.

Even thought I never thought becoming a quasi-adult would never happen to me, I - true to little girl without a Daddy format – imagined quasi-adulthood as a married woman. The question for me now is what if that doesn’t happen, what do I think of myself?

To tell you the truth, I really have no idea. What bucket do I fit in? Where do I belong? I always had this idea of how life was going to go and it is not going according to plan.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not sobbing in my pillow every night. I’m just confused. Do I wait for the circumstances in my life to create who I will be when I grow up or do I charge ahead to make my own circumstances?

I have this vision of myself straddling several fences right now.

I have one foot in my church world which I love but I don’t want to get too far from where I came from because I am afraid of loosing the rawness of the real decision I have made to follow Christ.

I have one foot in my work world which I also love but I don’t want to put both feet in because I lived too many years letting my life revolve around work and know what a dead end/ revolving door/ black whole life you can create for yourself when you are a workaholic.

I have one foot in friends’ worlds which I need but they have their own lives, so I am always fighting for their time with boyfriends, work or anything. Except for my friends Bryan and Jen who are always there for me no matter what.

So as I watch myself tread water in all these worlds, I wonder what it will take to push me over the fence and at the same time get completely sick of doing nothing.

At my job, we have been working on a conference for teen girls and the funny thing is, those girls are asking the same questions and they are 15. I guess this wondering never changes but one thing you can be sure of is that I will not tread water for long.

I met a girl today that said she wanted to teach film/photography in college because the students are always sad and she gets to love on them. Not that she loves teaching so much but that she loves broken people.

I have always thought that same thing but I just thought it was because I was a little messed up myself. Which has a lot to do with it but after some deep introspection over Starbucks, I really think I like broken sad people because to be broken and sad means that you actually have to care about something - to have passion. I bet that film students are all like that because it makes them better at their craft. Who wants to watch a movie that the director felt okay about? Maybe summer blockbusters fall in that category but I digress.

Passion and sadness. I bet that most people would not put the two together but for me being passionate means that you feel deeply about things and you are not afraid of that feeling whatever it is. People often hide their sadness because we humans look on sadness with pity. Why? Sadness to me seems like a great opportunity.

Can you ever really be known by people if they only know the happy sunshiny parts of you? More importantly, can you ever really know yourself if you are never challenged by the circumstances in your life?

To embrace sadness and be comfortable with it is to wear your insides on the outside. All gooshy and getting all over everybody. Kinda uncomfortable in a vulnerable way. I have some friends that are insides-on-the-outside people. They spend a lot of time in their house away from others because too many people have hurt their gooshy outsides – mostly Christians actually which confuses me because for some reason they want to be friends with me.

But you know - they know who they are. They wonder about careers and kids and all the stuff that the rest of us wonder about, but they do not wonder about WHO they are. Makes me jealous. I guess the lesson here for me is to be comfortable with my sadness around others and to be comfortable with my friend’s sadness without trying to fix it because it is beautiful.