Standing in my Kitchen

I burnt soup this morning. Danielle started making it before she left for work and I was left in charge of it while it ’simmered’. Little did we know that simmer is code word for burn terribly. Our whole house, myself included, has this lingering smell of burnt grossness. Hopefully the soup is salvageable. In an attempt to get rid of the horrible odour I am burning two candles and making chocolate chip cookies. I have also been eating a lot of cookie dough!

I spent some time last night with a good friend. He has been a big part of my life since before I even moved to Hamilton but his friendship has become even more meaningful now that we’re both in the same city. When I moved here at first he was my only friend in the city. God’s been good to both of us. We started talking about life and I began my latest lament about life being hard. We talked about my future, including job prospects, going back to school, getting married and moving (that’s quite the gamut). I told him that I was just so tired of things being such a fight all the time. At some point a couple things started to come together. As I slept on them they started to take more shape and by 9:00 a.m. this morning I had shared with the women I live with what I consider to be some significant thinking in my life.

See, I realized that I was tired of having to defend my life to the world. I’ve been really struggling lately to feel like my lifestyle is valid and legitimate. In my attempts to make things easier I have started to make plans about the future that line up pretty closely to the things people expect me to do. I’ve taken God out of the picture, started thinking about how to get a ‘real’ job that would allow me to make a living wage and get the things out of life that the world tells me are important. I realized last night that I had stopped believing that God had big plans for me. At some point it got easier to define my life choices as a ‘phase’ that I was attempting to grow out of, instead of standing up to the world and telling them that I actually believe that this is how God is calling me to live.

As I’ve begun thinking about the future (something that is not inherently bad to do… in fact, it’s likely even good) I’ve forgotten that God is creative. That He’s powerful enough to make new things out of nothing. Where I can’t see pathways from one thing to another, I’ve started to think about how I can build my own paths instead of allowing God to act in power and faithfulness. So I spent some time this morning turning away from the world and reminding myself who God really is. I spent some time reminding myself that He is committed to me, that He has big plans for me, that He’s not finished with me. For the first time in months I feel hope, peace and joy when I think about the future. I don’t know what’s going to happen… but I realized that it’s not up to me to create the future. It’s my job to be who God made me to be… to not hold back.