I have no idea what I am doing…
I don’t know if you have reached that point in your life, that point when you think that you should have it all figured out and know where you are headed in life. Well, I sailed passed that point a long time ago, but still at this point in my life, I have no idea where I am going. At 36, I should be knee deep into a normal life… marriage, kids, and an actual career… and I have none of them. Somehow deep within, I feel like I am still a college student–20 something years old with my whole life ahead of me. I’ll be 37 in a few months… that is only a handful of years away from 40!
Now, it isn’t like I can’t ask my self, “What have I done with my life,” and not come up with a good response. I have done a lot of things in my 36 years of life. I’ve joined the Army, fought on the front lines of a war, watched people die, helped save peoples lives. I’ve toured a good portion of the U.S., met important people, served as a Sunday School teacher, studied the Bible in depth, volunteered many hours, given 5 years of my life to youth leadership. I’ve packed my belongings and headed of to a strange state with no jobs and no personal connections. I’ve scratched my way through poverty, built a career, earned as much as most two income families in America, bought 2 houses, bought my dream truck. I’ve repelled of mountains, snorkeled in the Florida keys, peed of the edge of the Grand Canyon, dug ancient bones from the ground in the Bad Lands, driven cross-country–alone–in a ‘68 bug with no air conditioner, radio or working gas gauge. I have loved several women–and had my hear broken each time. I’ve sat wondrously beneath starry skies and peered into the cloud-like milky way. I have lost a close friend and watched as my father is stolen away piece-by-piece by the ravages of dementia. I have fought against anxiety, depression and several bouts with panic attacks. I quit an insanely well paying job to chase a dream. I escaped the grips of many tens of thousands of dollars of debt to become debt-free. I have done many things that I am ashamed of as well as many things of which I am proud. I have toured the Mara plains of Africa and met young orphans in Nakuru who sniff shoe glue to escape the miseries of life. I’ve heard a Mara tribesmen tell the story of how he killed his first lion and became a man–and somehow thought my life so much less exciting.
I have done many things in my nearly 37 years of life, yet it all still feels so incomplete. I feel I have yet so much to give. In some way, I feel like Moses who was called out of a normal Bedouin life to do something that he felt completely incapable of; or, maybe I feel more like Abraham who was called into a Bedouin life and had no clear leading or direction. Regardless of the example, both hold their legacies in their wandering–their calling wasn’t into something safe and easily defined, it was into something uncertain and seemingly reckless. I don’t actually equate my life to that of the patriarchs, but there is something in their stories that I find hauntingly familiar. I’m trying not to look to deeply at it, or project it too far into the future, but for now I am standing on the edge of something vast and asking, “which way Lord?”