When I was younger, I knew what I wanted. I looked around at people living normal lives, following patterns set by a culture that defined what the accepted route was. Graduating high school, getting a practical degree from a respected four year school, getting married, going to work in a 4x4 cubicle, and having kids was the set course for most people.
I hated the thought of living that life. Where was the adventure? Where was the excitement? Where was the sense of being caught up in something bigger than ourselves, the urgency of living, the love of every day? I remember watching this one scene from Beauty and the Beast over and over again. Belle runs out into a field after telling Gaston she won't marry him, and sings that she "wants adventure in the great wide somewhere. I want it more than I can stand. And for once it might be grand, to have someone understand, I want so much more than they have planned." This epitomized how I had always felt.
But still, when the time came that I graduated high school, and could live any big adventure I wished, I found myself at ORU, pursuing a respectable major. I met a boy that I fell in love with, and made good friends. And in the normalcy of everyday life, I grew comfortable. The more comfortable I became, the easier it was to ignore the sense that God had something bigger for me, something more off the beaten path. This feeling grew, and twisted within me the spring of my sophomore year, until it was impossible to ignore. I soon found myself dropping out of ORU to pursue an internship with a youth group in Texas that I had always admired.
That brings us to now, here, where I am. The summer is passing quickly, and with its closing, my friends will return to ORU, and the boy I love, to OSU. And as more time passes, the more I can feel the comfort of what I have known calling me, making me wish for the known and the familiar. But I always said that I wanted something different for my life. Something MORE. That the normal path wasn't for me.
Now its time to prove that I meant that. I guess at the end of the day, I would rather follow Gods will for my life, and be terrified, than to go back to where Im comfortable, and never know what He might have done through me.
