A Hundred Shillings Worth of Saturday's Thoughts

Written Saturday Night
Day 75

There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. –Anais Nin.

What is next? I have been blessed with so many great opportunities. How many college students have the chance to spend a semester in Mexico, tour Europe, and study in Uganda. What are these experiences preparing me for? I am a firm believer that God is using each one of these experiences to shape me into the woman that I am to become to best serve him…with knowledge comes responsibility. I have plans, goals, and dreams for after college, but those are up in the air contingent upon God. What if I graduate only to fall on my face and not know which way is up? Not understand my role in this life, in God’s great plan? I fear failure. I fear never achieving success. But what is success? What is true success? What makes a person successful or not? I have my own definition of success. Will I ever achieve it? Can I come to a place where I am moderately successful? Is success all or none? Can one gain partial success? I see myself five years from now. Graduated. Married. Involved in a ministry. Open. Excited. Striving for a joyful future. Motivated. Passionate. – Here I sit on the floor in my room in a cement house in Mukono in Uganda in Africa. What does this experience change? I have knowledge. I have passion. But what good is that if I do not have a venue for it? At what point does my knowledge converge on my passions and become productive? Every college student dreams of graduation, some with dread and others with joy and trembling, but how many come face to face with the reality there might not be a job by which one can define one’s self waiting for them. What do I pursue after graduation? A career, vocation, or identity? Who am I, and what am I looking for out of the eighty or so years that I have been given? What drives me? What keeps me going when my resolve is burning low? What makes me any different? God made me a unique person with my own dreams, hopes, and passions. Where does he want me? What does he want from me? We talk of how all God wants is our love, but really, is that all? Love. All encompassing, all consuming love that will motivate me to do other acts, that will drive me to new ends and new reason. Will I ever get to a place where I am so in love with my God that everything I do stems from a desire to express my love to him? I am certainly not there now. And still, he showers me with so much blessing, so much joy, so much love. Why me? Who am I that I am worthy of such blessing? The things that seem so simple are boundless when placed in the right perspective. What did I do to deserve this? Perhaps the only answer is that God is good. It is of nothing that I have or will do. I will never be worthy. I will never be justified by my actions. The best I can do is take what I have been given and use it to bless the children of God, the people that populate his world. I have been given these opportunities, this knowledge, a sound mind, a nationality that opens many doors, passion, and the grace to see it (perhaps not in the best perspective, alas). I guess all that is left is to raise my hands in awe and wonder and say Lord, use me. Wherever. However. Whenever. Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. Let me bring glory to your name with what you have graced mine with. I am but clay in the potter’s hands. May I become something that may be filled and poured out. Thank you Father God for all I have been given. All in abundance, in excess. I am truly blessed.
Who am I?