Two and a half years ago, I could’ve told you everything I was going to do: I was going to move away from Hawaii, the-rock-in-the-middle-of-the-ocean, go to college, make friends, get a real job (not one where I worked for my parents, because that’s not a real job). I was going to have a life, a real, actual life.
It’s what I’d wanted, what I’d always wanted, wasn’t it?
Or was it all something I’d pasted into my brain as something I thought I wanted?
Or maybe, was that life something society (i.e. books, movies, tv shows, the works) had fed me for so long that, somewhere along the line, I started believing I needed it in order to be happy, to feel accomplished and successful?
Because two and a half years ago, I graduated high school. I’d visited colleges and made all the plans to leave home for good when- my grandfather (see the stud in the picture above) needed someone to live with him, someone to be with him. He lived a mile away from my parent’s, in a house they’d built for him so that he would have a place to live out the rest of his days in paradise. He’s always lived with us, or very nearby. I can’t remember a day of my childhood where he wasn’t there, reminding me of when my birthday was, telling me about his wild adventures across the world, giving me advice about taxes and politics…
I gave my parents a year.
“One year from August.” I’d stay with Grandpa, work in their restaurant, make myself some money, focus on writing my book, drive my brothers to and from school…
Fast forward eleven months. My best friend just got engaged! My might-as-well-be-my-sister is due to give birth in a week! And I’m… doing nothing.
Yes, sure, I was spending quality time with my parents, my brothers, my sister-in-law, my grandfather, building abiding relationships with all of them as well as with the friends who remained nearby.
Yes, I was immersing myself in my work, my home, my community.
But it all seemed so unfocused, holding no weight in my grand plan. How was any of it going to move me forward and onwards towards my “real life?”
And while I was doing all of this nothing, moping around, hermiting myself into oblivion, getting myself into things I wouldn’t have otherwise if I hadn’t been so bored and stupid, my mom stumbled upon the World Race. She watched the video, cried inspired tears over it (she cries at everything), and sent it to me.
In the parking lot of Foodland in Waimea Hawaii, on July 3rd 2014, at about seven o’clock in the evening, I watched the video my mom sent me and for the first time in my life, I knew exactly what I was going to do with it.
That night, my life changed radically, and I was flipped from being vaguely goal oriented, to having a clear, precise vision of what I wanted, of what I knew God wanted. He’d been pretty clear about closing doors in my life, seeming to only open the ones that I wished he wouldn’t. But here was a door opened that fit every minutia of criteria that I had once put importance on, the things that had somehow been shoved away in order to make room for my “real life.”
There once was a time when I put God first, but he’d gotten placed to the side in my ambition and subsequent boredom, because his will had somewhere become irrelevant, or his shaping of my life unsatisfactory.
There once was a time when all I wanted to do was help other people! When my calling was to serve, to help, however I could, whenever, wherever. But life (of teenagers and young adults in pop culture) would have you believe that service is something meant for poor people, especially if you’re talented and smart.
There once was a time when all I wanted to do was travel, like how my father had, and his father before him. I wanted to see the world, but I almost traded that up for some other person’s opinion on it.
As I sat in the Foodland parking lot, dealing with the sudden, unbelievable vision my life now had, heading in a direction so right it could only have been from God, I was reminded of everything I’d once known to be true about myself and for the first time in forever (sing it), I felt like I’d finally returned to myself, like I was finally going to grow from there on out instead of wallowing in all that “nothingness” that now seemed so important.
I’d have missed everything, if I’d moved in my own time, on my own strength, in my own way. I wouldn’t have been the maid-of-honor in my best friend’s wedding; I wouldn’t have known my fairy godson from the size of a poppy seed, to see him walking; I wouldn’t have been with my parents through three near-death experiences, one diabetes diagnosis, one heart stopping six times.
Once I started seeing things in God’s time, his hand could be clearly seen in every aspect of my life. “One year from August” I said? One year from that August, almost to the week, my grandfather started falling every night, like clockwork. He’d fallen before, once or twice every other month, but it got worse, almost every other night. That same month, a storm hit and knocked out the power for almost two full weeks. For an eighty-eight year old man who relies on his tv and computer for, well, everything, this was a devastating loss. He started roaming the house after dark. He wouldn’t know where he was, wouldn’t know who I was, and would say that he “wanted to go home.” He aged so drastically in the next six months. He was no longer the stubbornly independent man he’d always been. Suddenly, he was relying on us for everything, and while it was really, really hard at times, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. And I wasn’t supposed to have missed it. Here is exactly where God meant me to be.
Now, he’s moving me.
Pretty drastically.
People keep asking me, “Yes, but what are you going to do after this trip? You know, with your life?”
If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that this is not my life. This is not my time.
I’m entitled to nothing, least of all life or time, both belong entirely to God.
So as far as my life goes?
Whatever he says, whenever, however.
My job is to wait on him.
