Amy Larson
Staff Writer
Even though I’m only a junior, I’m already getting questions about what I’m doing after I leave Pepperdine. That is a heavy question, and it makes me more than a little stressed. What am I doing after Pepperdine? I could barely pick a major, now I have to pick a career, too? Well-meaning friends and family have started asking what I want to do with my life. Being reminded of this fact each time I’m asked this question is a little unsettling.
The more frustrated I became with not knowing where my future rested, the more I began to plot things out. After graduation, I was going to stay around California for awhile, then maybe go back home to the Midwest, get a job with some nonprofit, get an apartment with a friend from high school, maybe get married, have a few kids, shift jobs every ten years or so, and finally, retire.
Problem solved!
I felt pretty secure in my little blueprint. At least I had an answer – a very specific answer. When people asked me what I wanted to do with my life. But no sooner could I say “401(k),” I heard something that changed my entire plan. My favorite band, MewithoutYou, came out with a new album, and I heard a song called “C Minor,” the chorus of which repeats, “Open wide my door, my Lord, to whatever makes me love You more.”
I was stuck. My plan was logical, practical, and a darn good answer to the “What are you going to do with your life?” question. Yet there was still something it lacked – God. Were my plans and God’s plans anything alike at all? Were the things I was planning to do things that would bring glory to him?
It was then that I began to be reminded of all the times in my life when I had created such exact, precise plans…only for them to be changed at the last minute.
Take Pepperdine, for instance. All my growing up years, I had a sort of bias against Southern California. I vowed never to live here. I’d decided it was far too cliché for the Iowa girl to grow up and move to Los Angeles. My senior year I was all set to go to a college on the east coast until a last-minute decision brought me to Pepperdine. Now I can’t imagine myself anywhere else, and am so incredibly grateful that I came to this university. My thoughts and plans are not always lined up with God’s.
However, I am constantly reminded that in the end, no matter what plans I have, it is God’s plan that prevails.
The Bible reminds me that God knew me before I was born and that he has “it all planned out – plans to take care of [me], not abandon [me], plans to give [me] the future [I] hope for” (Jeremiah 29:11). When I remember those things, I wonder why I would have ever wanted to override God’s plans with my own anyway. God is terribly innovative and infinitely creative, and our lives are a masterpiece just waiting to happen. He opens doors we never dreamed were available, closes ones that we never should have approached anyhow. What’s more, God made each of us with unique passions and interests that fit exactly with our purpose like pieces of a puzzle. Piece by piece the puzzle comes together – although we can’t make out the image it reveals at first, as more pieces come together, it becomes more and more clear. Day by day I’m learning that God is the one in control of the puzzle that is life, and that I must trust him with shaping it together.
01-25-2007