Life Goals

The far side of change has proven to be a very open and disorienting place. I find myself far from home without most of the time commitments I am accustomed to. I've graduated college, and without a graduate program to attend this year, I have no external academic structure to provide motivation. I have no old friends to visit, no commitments to any community beyond spending time with my husband and writing or calling home. In one sense, it has been a lovely time to rest and recuperate from a busy year. In another, it has been rather terrifying and isolating. I have found it so easy to wile away the hours watching tv, moping about the apartment, feeling guilty for my sloth but lacking motivation to do anything. I have wondered a great deal about who I am and how I am supposed to spend my life.

I've realized that this new environment means I must be far more intentional than is my wont. I must impose a schedule on myself, reach out of my comfort zone and get to know people and become committed to a church community. I have also realized that I need to be proactive about pursuing my goals and discovering my priorities. To that end, I have spent a good bit of time recently considering a list of life goals and trying to draft a personal mission statement. The mission statement needs more thought, although I might post it here when I'm finished. The life goals you can read under the new "Dreams and Plans" tab, should you so desire.

As Jeremiah and I have reflected together on the adventure of starting a new marriage, we have both thought a great deal about how the habits we lay down now will affect our future. I do not want to compromise my goals, my relationship with God and my husband, and find myself disappointed with life in a few decades. It's up to me to lay down habits of seeking God, building a healthy marriage, and working toward my personal and academic goals. 

I've also been encouraged that I shouldn't be ashamed of my goals--I just have to properly prioritize them. It is good for me to want to be an English professor, to want to pursue that passion which God has given to me. It is not selfish for me to work hard and make sacrifices to achieve that goal. The key is not to sacrifice higher priorities. 

Finally, God has reminded me that I am not doing academic work for myself. My studies so often feel self-serving. In school, I worked hard to earn praise and good grades, to succeed. Having graduated, I find it easy to do work only because I want to be accepted to Oxford or to some other prestigious program. But success ought not to be the end goal of my delight in literature. I have prayed a lot over the past few years about pursuing a PhD in English, and sometimes I feel like I've just been looking for divine permission to do something I love. What I often forget is that, by seeking guidance from God about my vocation, I have been asking Him to show me how I am supposed to serve Him and His church--not how I am supposed to serve myself. If, then, I believe teaching is a vocation of mine, I need to be doing it for God. That conviction lends an entirely new urgency to my reading and thinking.

These thoughts are mostly a sermon to myself, I suppose. Even as I grow in understanding of God's calling, I find myself failing to live by the concepts I've just learned. It helps to type them all out here, because then the ideas return to me with a new life, and I am convicted again of my need to live them out. At the moment, that means I need to go read the Bible and pray and then get on to my academic work.