Transitions?

Well. My trip home for the holidays is over.

Somehow, I thought I’d have all these things to say about the trip, but as I sit here, on the flight home, I find that I have remarkably little to say.  I figured that there would be some big revelation that would hit me, but really there wasn’t.  I figured there would be some strife or some major issue that would come up, and I’d spend half of my time at home trying to fix some problem someone was having.  But that didn’t happen either.  What did happen, you ask?  Well, let me sum it up for you.

In the month I was home, I spent lots of time with my family, especially my mom and dad and brother and sister-in-law.  I also spent a lot of time with Brittany.  And it was really quite nice.  It’s a strange thing to realize that you’ve missed people so much that you filled your life with other things to make yourself forget how much you missed them.  It’s also strange to come to the conclusion that the place you’ve come home to visit is still home, no matter how much you told yourself when you moved away that it was for good.

I’ll confess to you that I don’t really want to come back to Denver.  It’s not that I don’t love my friends here, or that I don’t like my roommates.  Really, I like them quite a lot. But I love the people at home more, and it’s really starting to hurt me that I’m not as big a part of their lives as I’d like to be.  I’m too distant now to be included in the day-to-day.  At the end of the last semester, I had the feeling that I was sick of Seminary and just wanted to quit.  Now, as I sit on this 737, rifling back to Denver, I know that the explanation I gave myself at the time (that it was normal to feel that way when you’re burned out) isn’t going to cover it anymore.  I want to go home.  I’m tired, I’m alone, and I want to have a normal life again.  I’ve been in school now continuously (not counting summer and winter breaks) since I was 5 years old.  I’m 25.  20 years feels like enough.  I want to work.  I want to teach.  I want to live like a normal person for a while.  I’m sick of being a student. Don’t get me wrong, I want to finish my M.Div.  I just don’t want to do it anymore at the expense of everything else.  I want to go to school part time, and teach and get myself out of the debt I’ve slowly fallen into for the last 7 years, since I started my undergrad.  And I can see a way I can do that.  I see it right in front of me.  And suddenly, everything seems to make sense.

I’m trying not to make too much of this in my head.  I know how I get when I get excited about stuff, and so I’m waiting to spend a couple of weeks back at home in Denver before I really start taking stock of what this might mean.  But I know what I felt when I started thinking about ways I could go home for a while, and I can tell you those feelings have been there for a long time.  It’s clear to me now that even when I moved to Denver, it didn’t take me long to cultivate the desire to go right back.

I’ve taken some abuse for that from my roommates and a few other people.  For a while, it really bothered me.  Right now, as I sit here, I can tell you that I would stand up to all that abuse to just go home and be normal.  My life is exactly that.  I will not be a slave to people’s perceptions and expectations of me.  I won’t do it.  There are too many perceptions and expectations on me from various different quarters that I will never be able to please everyone.  So then, ultimately, it all comes down to what I have to do to please myself.  That ultimately always means pleasing God first.  He knows better than I do what is best for me, and his expectations are the only ones that really interest me.  I need to figure out a way to make everyone else understand me better without trying to explain it to them, because it feels like people don’t trust me when I talk about myself, like somehow I don’t know this important thing about me.  *shrugs*

This semester is going to be a drag.  I’m trying to take 17 credits this semester, and still work 3 days a week.  If it ends up working that way, I’m going to have to hop on it real quick,or I’m going to get buried early and never recover.  I also need to explore my options for next fall.  There have been some developments that have me questioning where it is exactly I belong.  Next fall is when this stuff starts falling into importance, as I have a variety of options for what I’ll be doing.  I need to figure out which options are feasible and which ones are not so I can get my mind around the different aspects of each option.

I’m sick of typing right now, and we’re going through some serious turbulence, so I’m going to stop for a while.  More on this to come. I hope you’re all doing well, and that your new year has begun well. Blessings.