Spring Break is flooding my social media. I have friends building houses in Houston and making friends with mangoes in Florida, and Facebook is reminding me that two years ago on this day I was posting pictures of Panama City Beach sunsets.
But my life now doesn’t have the ebbing and flowing cycles of the school calendar, and so I sit in my apartment, watching the sparkling snow of yesterday sink into the still-dormant earth, and drinking my tea (black tea mixed with jasmine green tea, full and comforting), and evaluating my life and direction.
I always assumed I would be great. Do great things, be the best at something. In high school, I was convinced I was the best and the smartest, and that would make life easy. maybe it was these expectations that have made it hard for me to risk failure. I f I wasn’t going to be the best, I didn’t want to do something. Rather than work through the hard stuff to get better, I wanted to have arrived without the pains of work. that’s why I have always been so proud of the half- marathon I ran. I was not the best. Not even close. But preparing took discipline I didn’t know I possessed.
All that to say, I don’t take failure well. And that makes the process of finding a job, and more than that, figuring out a purpose, difficult. It makes the writing process difficult. Because rejection is a part of life. And failure is a part of life. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
In Ecclesiastes 11, Solomon says, “He who observes the wind will not sow, and he who regards the clouds will not reap. As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child so you do not know the work of God who makes everything. In the morning sow your seed, and at evening, withhold not your hand, for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good” (vs. 4-6).
It’s humbling to be reminded that there is so much I will never know or understand. And one of those things is what the future will bring. If we wait until there is certainty of success, we will never step forward into anything. And that is not the life of faith we’re called to.
God calls us to step into things. To be diligent. To work hard. But those aren’t the things that bring success. It’s God that breathes life into our work.
