Being Joyfully Lost

Most of the time I don’t mind getting lost; you see something that you hadn’t meant to see (good and bad) and generally speaking you can get back on track at some point. Granted when you are lost on a hiking trail in a downpour or lost on your way to an interview or appointment that is another problem… I named this blog “Joyfully Lost” because you could probably drop me anywhere in the world (sub-artic) and I would be pretty happy exploring. But I also titled my blog thusly because I am still working on becoming joyfully lost in life (because I am most definitely lost). I have no idea what I’m doing next, I have a plane ticket home but until I’m on the plane I have no idea whether I’ll go home or not and even then there is that stopover in Amsterdam that could provide a tempting exit point.

Generally speaking I have followed a prescribed path through high school and then university; even my year in Japan I was still moving towards my Bachelor’s degree. This has mostly been my perceived track in life but I have never seen the path ahead of me to know if it is correct or not. It is the path behind me that has served of a guideline of sorts to how I should proceed. I make judgments based off my environment, my past experiences (this worked and that didn’t), and what direction I feel God is pulling me in.

But while this is the area of life that I am constantly lost in it is also the area of life where I have the most problem reconciling the ideas of “joyful” and “lost”. I keep wanting to plan for the future; I want to know what I am going to do in my life and I want to know if I will have a conventional career and what that will look like and I want to know what I would enjoy doing the rest of my life. I want to know if I’ll ever graduate university, if I’ll get my master’s degree, if I’ll live abroad… The questions go on. And they aren’t bad questions in and of themselves, most people ask them.

I don’t want to live an aimless life; the kind of life where I drift through the easiest doors. And at the same time trying to plan for the future has been a trial that makes me think and aimless life might have its appeal. Through my life I have made some life decisions based on perceived futures that don’t exist anymore and I look back and wonder “what if….” I know that God has a purpose for each and every moment of my life but it is still easy to feel like time has been wasted or that I should have been more decisive in certain situations.

I honestly don’t know how to be joyfully lost in life. I don’t know how to balance planning for the future and living out every day and moment to the best of my ability. It always seems that I am sacrificing one for the other. If I am focusing on the moment and just living day to day then the big decisions catch me off guard and I miss opportunities for the future. At the same time if I make decisions based on my plans for the future I often sacrifice a lot in the present. I guess maybe the question is how much of the present is it healthy to sacrifice for the future? I don't want to sound like I'm complaining because my life has, for the most part, been incredible. I'm just confused about how to take what I have learned and am learning from this last year and how to apply it to the present and to the future. 

I wish I had answers, I really really like answers…. But I don’t so I guess I just have to get over it.

For now I am just going to practice being joyfully lost in Christ, trying to lose myself, my desires and my pain, so completely in him that it is His will being played out every day in my life. I think this means having a mixture of living out every day as a follower of Christ; living joyfully in the moment despite my disorientation, and praying constantly that my will is aligned with his and that he will show me enough of what He has planned for me that I can make the right choices for the future. Granted I am going to completely and utterly fail because I’m human and I sin; but at least it gives me a current present goal that doesn’t require me to sacrifice the present for the future.

(I feel like this should have been tied into some real life story about me getting physically lost in Africa but it doesn’t…. So far I’ve found my way everywhere I’ve gone….. but I am confident that there is a chance I could get lost before I leave.)

Life in Transition

Being a student in university I am in an obvious stage of transition. I am transitioning from being a dependent to being independent. Throughout the year I am transitioning from life in British Columbia to life in Washington State; transitioning between churches, friend groups and jobs. Because I love to travel so much I voluntarily choose to transition between cultures for either a couple of weeks or a couple of months at a time. Since I graduated high school in 2010 I have lived in 3 different cities in 3 different countries and now I am living for a short period in my fourth city and fourth country. I have also made short trips in that time to 5 other countries that I haven’t lived in. I love the change; I love exploring different regions and meeting new people and experiencing different cultures. That is why I chose to major in International Studies and why I chose to intern abroad.

But at the same time I catch myself making plans for a time without transition. As much as I love variety I also very much prize a sense of stability. I like knowing that I can travel for ten weeks in Uganda and come back to my same school or same house; or that I can leave behind my high school friends at the end of the summer and know that I have friends up at college. Skype is genius as well because I always know that I can talk to anyone anywhere if I miss them. But when I find myself making plans for the long term I also find myself waiting to commit to friendships or to activities because I don’t want to do anything short term. I think that I have this idea in my head that once I am out of university I can find a job and have some sort of base, find that stability in creating a hometown and a central community. Until then I catch myself being unwilling to dive in deep in the areas of my life that I see as temporary.

However, after being here and talking to the people around me I have realized that the transitions aren't going to stop after I leave university (should this have been obvious? Probably). I am going to be constantly transitioning through life changes. Chances of me finding one job I want to do for the rest of my life are slim; I’ll probably transition through several jobs. With the job changes are probably going to come living changes as well, whether they be in geographical location or just housing arrangements. And that is just me in life as a single. I am fairly sure that one day I will want to get married and have children which means a transition from a single life into a couples life and then into family life. And as my kids grow older I will be transitioning through each of their life stages as well until I transition into that empty nest stage and then possibly become a grandparent.

I have no idea if any of that is even in God’s plan for me but my point is that I am coming to realize that life is all about transition. There is very little about life that remains the same from day to day, in fact there is nothing besides Christ that will remain unchanged in this life. For me that translates into the fact that I need to stop waiting for any sense of permanency to make commitments or to dive into life head first. Because that is never going to happen; I don’t want to live the rest of my life compiling lists for a “someday.” I’d much rather live out each day in each environment without thinking about the inevitable expiry date. This change in mindset isn't going to be easy but I want to try living without putting things aside for a tomorrow that has no promise of coming.*

I want that change in mindset to define my time in Uganda. I want to make this a period where I live everyday taking advantage of the opportunities that come my way. And maybe if I can learn to do that here I can learn to do this everywhere else. And maybe the hardest thing will just be learning how to say goodbye and hello over and over again.

Maybe this blog is just an instance of me thinking out loud but I know I it has been over a week since my last blog so this is what you get for right now!

*School work is definitely the exception to this; procrastination within the school environs is an issue to tackle on another day

**On a side note update everything here has been really great. Now that I am feeling better I finally have the time and energy to hang out with people and having a social life can definitely make all the difference when you live in a foreign country!