The Next Right Step

            I have been rejected more in the last three weeks than I have in my entire life. It started the day before graduation. Two hours before I had to take my last final to be exact. The job I really wanted, the one I had three interviews with, that I thought went really well, sent me a lovely email telling me I was great, but would not be working for them. I probably would have been fine if I hadn’t already picked out my new apartment in my new city. I probably would have been fine if my whole family hadn’t been in town reiterating over and over that they couldn’t wait to help me move for my cool new job they were so sure I’d get. I probably would have been fine if that rejection weren’t followed by five more over the span of two weeks.

            It is not that I am un-fine, exactly. But as an already sensitive person, this has just sent me on a particularly rough emotional roller coaster. Depending on the moment I sway between “I’m fine, I’ll just go where the wind takes me…” to “Where am I going to be in 10 minutes, in 10 months, in 10 years?!”  Mostly, I have been struggling to trust. Trust that God loves me, trust that there is good in all of this, trust that I have a purpose that I will eventually find, and have something to do with my life. I hate this. I hate not knowing the end of my story. Not just in the broad sense of wanting to know what the rest of my life has in store, but in a much more immediate way. Once the lease on my current apartment runs out (In just over 2 months) I have no clue what to do, where to go, how to live my life. I just have to trust, and I hate it.

           

Last week in church we were talking about Peter. In Matthew 14:22-36 Jesus walks on water in the midst of a storm, and calls Peter out of a boat to join him. Peter steps out of the boat and starts moving towards Jesus. But the passage says that when Peter saw the storm around him, he began to sink. When he takes his eyes off of Jesus, and notices the storm, and the waves, and the wind around him, he sinks. I ask God to help me trust all the time. I ask him, like Peter did, to call me out in faith to walk on water with him. But when he actually gives me the opportunity to walk with him, to trust him, I look not to his face, but instead notice the storms that surround me, and I sink. I think it is easy for me to ask things of God without really understanding what I am requesting. When I ask God to help me trust, or really to help me with anything, what I really mean is I would like my life to be calm and easy. I would like to wake up one day with all of the characteristics of Christ I didn’t have the day before. I don’t want to actually use any of my new found strength in Christ; I just want to know they’re in my arsenal.

If I am being really honest:

I want to be healed without first being broken
I want courage without having to face my fear,

I want hope without experiencing despair,

I want joy without knowing sorrow,

I want to trust without having to walk through a storm.
I want the end result in my life, but I reject the process to get there.

            This season I am in, this season of not knowing, of what feels like free falling, I reject it daily. I reject it because it is making me face things I don’t like about myself. I have realized how tightly I cling to control, how often I worry what others are thinking of my life choices, how scared I am to let go and just move forward, to trust God for the next right step. But that is where I am. I am trusting for the next right step. I am slowly letting go control, and the more I give it up the more I realize I never had any to begin with. I don’t know what the next year, or even the next few months hold for me. I haven’t had any divine revelations, or obvious signs from the Lord as to what I should do next in life. I do know that I where ever I go, whatever I do God goes before me to prepare the way. I know that if I keep my eyes on him and not on the storms around me I can begin to trust without boarders, and walk wherever God leads me. I know I can be confident in God to show me the next right step.