Lent.
My favorite time of year is finally here!
This is the time of year that I work my hardest to live a better life. I always try to give up something that will help me to become a better person, in the past I tried getting rid of all of my "extra," worked to finish everything I started, stop procrastinating and being late for everything. For those that know me, please regain your composure and have a little faith that one day, I will be awesome at one of those things...maybe.
This year?
I am going to trust God and I really want to succeed.
What does that even mean?
I am truly going to put my life in God's hands. I know that I am supposed to do that anyway, but I usually fall short. For the next forty days I am really going to work hard at trusting him and it is so important that I do it more than ever.
About a month ago I got fired from the job that brought me to Terre Haute.
Well, to hear my bosses tell it , I am not going to be renewed for the next fiscal year. Geoff worked really hard to word it so I shouldn't feel fired and even told me that I was exceptional at the job I was doing. But really? I am not going to have a job on June 30th and it was not my idea to stop working and in my book that equals fired. Right?
I am not at all surprised because though I am pretty exceptional at my job, it wasn't exactly the job they'd wanted me to do. I had been struggling for a while with their expectations: they want me to be more administrative in my role and I...want to do outreach. So, when I left our meeting knowing I would possibly unemployed in four months that along with everything I was feeling, I experienced relief.
That was when I made the decision to trust God and His plan for me.
Please don't think this has been easy for me, relieved or not, getting fired offers a quite a blow to the ego. I can't help but question if I could have made it all work if I would have tried harder. Even though I knew there were certain aspects of my job that were not making me happy and I was sacrificing so much of my sanity just trying to get it right, I felt like I should deal with it. I mean, there was a reason I came here, right? It hurts a lot that I couldn't make this work, that my flaws outweigh my assets. That no matter how you slice it, I wasn't good enough. It might take a while to get past that.
As I make plans to leave, I have been trying to wrap my head around what all of this means. What have I learned? How have the last two and half years made me better? What was the point of me coming here at all? And more importantly, what's next?
To find the answers to all of those questions (especially the last one), I am going to work hard at not worrying. When I fail to trust God, I make pretty horrible decisions and manage to make myself and everyone else miserable as we all try to pick up the pieces. Through my reflection, I am going to better understand God's plan for my life. I am going to follow the adage of praying as everything depends on God while working as everything depends on me.
My hope is to make this Lent a time of transformation and I can't do that if I am constantly worrying about what comes next. I want to make it so that even if I don't know what I am doing by April 20th, that I will have a peace that will carry me through the Easter season until I know what that next step will be.
I am on my way to get my ashes now, and even though they won't show up (they rarely do!) I will don them proudly knowing that with this season of sacrifice, I am going to let all of that worry fall away. I am going to trust that this next step is in God's hands and this Lent is going to great!
Do me a favor:
I might not do so well as this task, please remind me of my trust in God's will in two weeks when you find me in the corner sleep deprived, with tear-stained checks frantically updating my resume for the millionth time while trying to figure how this whole Linked In thing works. I would really appreciate it!
