living one life

Today I woke up in a bit of a realization.  You see I've been fumbling around my thoughts for a week or so now and I've been trying to put together all that God has brought into the light recently.  You know, like those times when all of a sudden the work God has been doing comes into place and you realize why your life has been on a roller coaster recently?  Yeah that feeling.  Well here's my shot at trying to put all of those things into words. 


I've officially completed my first year out of college.  And in all honesty, it didn't go as planned.  In fact it was much harder and more trying then I thought it was going to be.  Not sugar coated in the least, but that's another story.  In the last year my life has changed, I've grown up a bit, and I've changed my path...or God has really.  I thought I wanted to be a teacher...nope.  I mean to some degree I will always be a teacher.  Those are just the skills that have been engrained in me and how I will always work.  But now I have been given an amazing blessing that changes my path and mission in life.  At least for now.  


You know when you're a kid and you ask and ask and ask for a certain type of cereal?  And finally one day you're at the store and you mom, for whatever reason says you can get the one you've always wanted (even though she knows it's coated in sugar and has obnoxious toys that she will have to pick up) and your world freezes.  Nothing. Else. Matters. because you have won.  It takes all you have to not rip open the cereal box and eat it right then and there (instead you carry it all the way to the check out).  Well that's how I've felt recently.  I've been given that HUGE blessing to be an RD this next year at Geneva College and let me tell you, I can't tell the difference between terrified and excited anymore.  God is telling me to go.  To spend my next couple years investing in this place and taking in all that I can.  The puzzel pieces are coming together.  And I have so much to learn but it feels as if a once dreaded, unknown and unplanned chapter of my life is coming to an end.  


I was at APU this past weekend and realized that my life has been a culmination of a lot of things.  You see, I got to have coffee with some incredibly wise and selfless friends who poured every bit of anything into me about this next chapter in life.  The ins and outs, the ups and downs, hopes and dreams, excitement and encouragement plus a dash of reality.  And I realize that this is my life.  I have been so blessed to know people who constantly pour into me.  My life is their lives displayed through me.  If that makes any sense, and I hopefully have been doing the same for others.  And now I get the chance to do it in such a big way.  And I'm terrified but also know that those same people who sat with me this weekend will be the same people I know are routing for me and encouraging me along the way.  Mostly I'm still in disbelief and I love that I'm not in this alone.  


How great and amazing is the Body of Christ.  That we aren't just living our lives by ourselves.  But that we are continually living one life for Christ.  

Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body,so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free —and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many.

-1 Corinthians 12:12-14