Why I Didn't Know What I was Supposed to be Doing with my Life

It's crazy when I get these little inspirations to write blogs.  So many monumental things have been happening in the past few days and I'm constantly thinking and taking it all in.

I'm graduating in five months. I finished my budget for my last semester of college. I completed my last RA training today. 

I'm going to be a little honest and say that last week, I was absolutely dreading coming back to Liberty early for RA training.  I get frustrated with having to sit in the same spot for hours, listening to things that I "feel" as though I already know.  Or I get mad when a training session would take 45 minutes, when I know that it could be taught within ten minutes.  My pride does that sometimes because I am a very direct person. I deliver things directly and I want things given to me directly or else I'm going to just tune it out and not listen.   It's that simple.  

So Monday morning, I was not very happy about getting up early and heading to training. I had to put on the "positive" attitude face and just "get it over with".   But after the first couple of hours, my whole entire approach towards it changed and I was deeply humbled.  To sum it all up (and I'll go into further details in a bit), it was exactly what I've been needing for the past several weeks, if not months, or years.

One thing that I have been struggling with lately is figuring out what I'm going to do next after graduation. I really don't know if you understand exactly HOW much of a struggle it is because I'm a planner, I have to have everything planned out or else I'm going to panic.  So not having a definite, concrete plan is tough, and I mean TOUGH.  

I think that being a double-major kind of set me up just a tad for the confusion.  I practically have double the options and I'm not sure which one to take.  I get all of these "great ideas".  I've been placed on the "consideration" table for companies to interview me for a job after graduation.  I've considered pursuing photography full time.  I've considered graduate school.  I've wanted to do SO much that I didn't even take the time to FULLY reflect and seek the Lord about exactly what He wanted me to do.  I'd just take an idea and it would sound good at the time and I'll go with it and was convinced at those moments that it was what God wanted me to do.  Then another circumstance may come up and I would doubt that decision and start to make another.  I would go back and forth with my plans for after graduation and I would never even take into consideration of what God actually wanted me to do.  I'd just "accept" the fact that God would reveal it to me when He wanted me to.  I made the excuse for how "He'd probably just tell me the day before graduation".  

But to be completely honest, I haven't placed my trust in Him over the past few months.  I figured that making the decision would be easy for me because I wasn't in a relationship with anyone and since I didn't have other people to factor in regarding where I wanted to go, I was good.  I was just "analytically" coming up with plans on my own so that I can be financial stable once I obtained my diploma.  That was it.  It became so hard because I have the desire and the skill to do so many things.  So if I were to take one option and focus on that, I'll be missing the others.  It became hard and stressful because I wasn't being led by what God wanted me to do.

The very first thing that was addressed in RA training that struck me hard this week was learning the differences between "being" and "doing".  That set the tone immediately because sometimes we tend to make what we "do" be the establishment of our identity.  Instead of allowing our identity influence what we do.  Our "being" is who we are.

Another toe stepper for me was in one of the breakout sessions that we did today. We talked about our strengths and how sometimes, in our sin nature, we seek to use our strengths as a means to influence selfish gain. That breakout session reminded us of the StrengthsQuest survey that I took about 3 years ago.  Every RA needs to take it before submitting their application, but I took it in my Freshman year.  I really only took the test to put into my application, so I never really read into the details that they gave us let alone remembered what my strengths were in case someone asked.  I've always been familiar with some of the strengths that I had, but never knew exactly what my "top 5" were and what they meant.

So I sat here and logged into the account to look at them.  Here they are with a brief description

Achiever

• Great deal of stamina and work hard. Takes great satisfaction from being busy and productive. 

Competition

• Measure their progress against the performance of others. They strive to win first place and revel in contests. 

Analytical

• Search for reasons and causes. They have the ability to think about all the factors that might affect a situation. 

Responsibility

• take psychological ownership of what they say they will do. They are committed to stable values such as honesty and loyalty 

Significance

• Want to be very important in the eyes of others. They are independent and want to be recognized.  

                          As a slight side note to me, one thing that stood out was that I want to associate with people that are       credible, successful, and professional.  If they aren't then I would push them until they are. Or would move on. 

I looked through them an IMMEDIATELY saw the places in my life where I act on these things for my own selfish gain.   For the Achiever trait, although I really enjoy relaxing, if I don't have anything to do, I get frustrated and angry.  I would constantly stress myself out to complete a goal in time. I would stay up all night, I would lose sleep. If I'm not physically working on it, I'm mentally working on it when I'm in bed. I have insomnia because my brain simply does not slow down. 

For competition, I am CONSTANTLY comparing myself with others. I'm super critical about myself and my work and I often doubt myself if I don't think that I can compare to another person with more experience.  To be honest, I thought the experience that I had out of college wasn't enough. I really thought that I wasn't going to get a job out of graduation because of the lack of so called "experience" that I had on my resume. Several of my peers excelled in those areas far more than I thought that I was so I just felt as though I didn't amount up to it. I came to the knowledge of how stupid that was when I actually started applying. I compare myself relationally with others.  I compare myself physically. I compare myself mentally. There are even times where I would compare myself spiritually.  I literally live a life of comparing myself to others in a way that is either feeling inferior or superior to them.

I'm so analytical that I would not take anyone's word for law unless I challenged it.  If I didn't challenge their logic directly, I would definitely do it indirectly.  There are things that I would REFUSE to do because of the fact that it simply did not make sense to me logically.  Another aspect to this is that I would not take risks unless I logically thought it all out.  I would have to think about all the outcomes and if I couldn't justify it by the analysis, then I wasn't doing it.

For responsibility I feel as though I have to be loyal to people that I know I shouldn't be.  Just because they have done something for me in the past, I should be obligated to be there for them whenever they needed.  Even IF it meant that I needed to be treated like crap for quite a while.  

Then lastly, there's Significance. I feel as though this one goes in so many different depths.  But the biggest thing is definitely my associations.  I hate being around people that don't live up to their potential.  But every so often, I have a few friends here and there that I'm constantly nagging and nagging until they can reach it.  I don't even care how my delivery is, I'm going to push them until it gets that way.   Another area is that I FEAR rejection.  Seriously, I am TERRIFIED of it.  This has come into affect with expressing my emotions and feelings toward situations or people. I feel as though I have to keep my emotions to myself so that I'm not vulnerable.  So that they won't be rejected. If I sense any ounce of possible rejection, then I'm not going to go with it.

But at the same time I have seen where these strengths are absolutely AMAZING when I take the time to operate in the ways of the Lord and not thinking about myself. I have to remind myself that these strengths are a gift of God.  I didn't just develop them on my own. God decided that He was going to give these to me because of the calling that He had for me. When I decide to allow my identity to be a reflection of Him instead of trying to be "Quayla", I can allow His calling to take root into my life and the lives of others.  Because, lets just tell the truth, I'm not all that great to begin with.  So I really have no reason to try to enforce my own identity. 

So with this brief detour, the one thing that has been stuck in my mind for the past few weeks is the word "passion".  I didn't necessarily know why.  It was just in my head and I was constantly thinking about that statement I heard in Convocation several months ago about "finding your sweet spot". Like a combination of what you're passionate about and what you're good at.  That midpoint and that's your spot.  But that just made everything so vague because I'm inherently good at more than one thing.  

What I asked myself constantly over the past few weeks was simply, "what am I passionate about?" I never took the time to answer that.  But when I sat through the strengths breakout session, I was able to learn about it so much more. To pinpoint it in a way that I never exactly thought I could.  

Regardless of where I'm supposed to go and what I'm supposed to do with my life after I graduate, it all comes down to a Passionate Mission.  Whether it's in the "secular" environment or if I'm working for a church ministry or wherever.   But figuring out your passionate mission would all come down to asking yourself these four questions:

What do I believe?
Where do I see brokenness?
Who am I sent to?
What will I do?

Those four questions automatically had something click for me. There are things that I believe, the brokenness that I am more prone to see that literally MOST people do not.  I have already been sent and drawn to a certain group of people. Seriously, today, it clicked. While I'm still putting details together, I think that it finally made sense with what I'm supposed to be doing long term   Literally, after spending almost 4 years debating about what I'm going to be doing after May 2014 it has never seemed to be anymore clear than what it does now.  

I know this is a lot to take in for one post, but as I'm ending this, I really came to a place these week where the Lord TORE me apart.  I don't even know how to fully explain it in every single detail.  But to think that the reason why I didn't know what I was going to do with my life is because I was focusing on things other than what the Lord was calling me to do.  I didn't invest the time that I should have asking Him to reveal it to me.  Because all it takes is to getting out of your pride and listening.  Because He does speak.

-Quayla