On being kind of old...

"So there I was my senior year in college, still feeling like I had no clue what I'd be doing after I graduated. [...] And the more I read the Scriptures, the more uncertain I became about my plans for the future, or even of the wisdom of making plans in the first place, since God seems to be in the business of messing them up. It didn't help that I was majoring in sociology, the study of human behavior. (How much more vague can you get, and what do you do with that degree?) And folks were asking me what I was going to do when I graduated from college. People always want to define you by what you do. I started saying, 'I'm not too concerned with what I am going to do. I am more interested in who I am becoming. I want to be a lover of God and people.'"

Shane Claiborne wrote this is in his book The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, but I feel like I could have written just that in my journal over the last months.

Oh wait. I have.

As the ominous senior year approaches, the questions inquiring what I'm going to do with my life thereafter have been raining down like sucker punches in a schoolyard scuffle. I've taken to barely holding my ground by ambiguously throwing out maybe working in DC mutter mutter maybe grad school but ehh mutter mutter maybe teaching English somewhere for a bit mutter mutter. Mutter mutter. Mutter mutter. All this to say, heck, I have no effing idea. As disappointing and impractical as that may be to my parents (and a lot of other folks and sometimes even me), I really just don't know.

There are certainly some things I am interested in, some things I feel God has given me a heart for, and some things I definitely don't ever wish to pursue, but pulling them altogether into a life-lasting "occupation" of sorts is one thing that still eludes me. I have attempted many a time to somewhat organize my thoughts in written manner with the hopes that when I read back through them, a cohesive answer will magically appear on the page. And every single time, the only thing of which I am more and more sure is the same sentiment Claiborne expresses in the above paragraph. Hum. Así que, vamos a ver, ¿eh?

On another note, it's uncanny in how many ways I identify with Claiborne as I read through his book. In fact, many times what he writes, I have written the same thought processes, questions, insecurities, indignations, etc. in my own journal. Weird.

I'm sure there will be more entries to come as we see how the book finishes out. I hope it gets messy...