Reality Check

It is October. That is wonderful for a thousand reasons, most of which is that October has consistently been a month of fascinating travel experiences for me that ultimately add to my life in some way or another. I am sure this one will not prove to let me down with my first trip abroad taking place in merely seventeen days. I think about that, at times, well really who am I kidding - most of the time - and it sort of catches my breath each time it comes to recollection and registers with my brain. I am leaving the country in two and a half weeks. Gulp.

The preparations for this trip have consumed most of my life, leaving me sort of discontent with life as it is until I go. I am on a quest to get started on all of the academic and professional work I will have waiting for me when I return. I constantly evaluate the amount of funding I have raised and all that is left to pick up, supply-wise. Everyday is like this constant battle to try and live just today and stop working so hard to get ready for tomorrow.

This discontent seeps through into all areas of my life, when I let it. I check out of classes, barely paying attention to what I'm reading and processing in class. I take work for what it is and wonder where the moments of passion and purpose are in the things I am accomplishing, because at times it all seems so pointless. I question everything about my current lifestyle - how I eat, what I read, how active I am. And most of all I wonder constantly whether I am really doing anything of significance with my life? I have felt this way over the last serveral days, wanting to just cast off everything and live in the woods or something. I mean, I don't know - it's just how I think sometimes.

And then comes the reality check.

Going to Africa is going to be a hugely impactful experience in my life. However, who am I to think that is less than just one of many? How could all of this not be the work of God in my life? Vanderbilt, my assistantship, Nashville, my friendships, and all. I mean I know it's not nearly as raw and simplistic as a life spent serving abroad (which is secretly a passion of mine) and at times, if I let it, can be very much "the grind" or "the rat race" that many Americans spend their days living. And it's not all as "lost and forgone" as I sometimes like to believe it is; I am not on my own and there is work to do.

I don't to live by the world's standards and I think I'm starting to realize I don't want to live by my own, either. Because to many degrees, they are polarizing. There is a happy medium and it involves seeing God in your everyday life, whether you're riding a landcruiser for hours on a bumpy road just to bring hope to a remote African village or perusing the stacks of a historic library for research sources at a top-20 university. And the people... there's people everywhere in need, even some of the wealthiest, smartest, and most sociable of my classmates and students are searching for something more than what they have. And as much as I am blessed to be in preparation for my trip to Tanzania, I am just as blessed to spend hours everyday at a university where people are passionate about learning and education (among other things... but that's another story).

Let me live each day with these intention of being "all there" wherever I am, like the great Jim Elliot quote. Maybe this October will be equally enriching because of the ten minute trip I take everyday through morning rush hour traffic to be right in the middle of this city, at the heart of this campus - experiencing the development, first-hand, of some of this nation's brightest students.

Funny, too, that written above me here on the wall of a place where I sometimes question God's presence is this quote by George Peabody, for whom this particular college is named after: "I have prayed my heavenly Father day by day that I might be enabled before I died to shew my gratitude for the blessings which He had bestowed upon me by doing some great good to my fellow men."

Yeah, that's what it's about.