by: Kimberly Phelan '18
Committing to Abandonment
In other news, just because you’ve known what you were gonna be when you grew up since the 5th grade, does NOT mean that’s what God is gonna have you be when you grow up. Because let me tell you, you’re probably wrong.
Going into the Fellowship, I knew what I was doing. I was going to work for the AgriLife Extension Service, helping people in my local community learn how to live healthy lives. This sounds great in theory, but that was the extent of the plan. I didn’t have a plan for how to live out my spiritual life. I was soley focused on my worldly plan, and as I went through the Fellowship, my eyes were opened. I realized I longed for more than simply existing. My mission in life (which as a Leadership major, I have to write down at least twice a semester in college…) is to help those who helped me. I want to help educate the future leaders of our world. Now, looking at that, I always thought that the Extension Service was completing that mission perfectly, and it was. But it was missing a major aspect of my life—God.
Throughout this semester, time and again, I have told God that my life is in His hands. For the past eleven years, I have known what university I would go to and what my major would be. I have shaken all the right hands and kissed all the right babies. I have the connections in my field that I need to be successful. And suddenly, boom. I am graduating a semester early (which I found out about three weeks before my final semester began), I applied to a graduate school I hadn’t been planning on applying to at all, and I am currently looking at a completely different life path than I have ever even imagined for myself.
Now, I am quite the ISTJ (btw, I got my 2019 planner last month and I am all too excited about it—SEEK and Deacon Gabriel’s Ordination are already penciled in), but even so, I am surprisingly OK with not knowing what I will be doing in the following weeks after I graduate. I know that it will work out, one way or another. And I know that this acceptance has come from my complete commitment to placing my life in His hands.
I don’t know where I am headed, but I know that wherever it is, it will fulfill my mission in life and deepen my relationship with Christ. He has the pen, and it is now time for Him to complete my story.