Around noon, I got the word that I would be making the drive up to Nashville to make a delivery and also a pretty important pickup for work. I’ve gotten to a point where long drives have little to no effect on me, but a round trip to Nashville is quite the trek. I guess the good thing is that some of my closest friends are living up there, so I could at least work in a dinner date with some of them. Having someone to visit always makes a business trip a little easier, so I grabbed a quick lunch and started the haul up north a little.
While I knew the weather was getting rough, I was blessed with not even a raindrop (side note, but a blessing none the least). The deliveries went well and I thank God for whoever he gave the idea of a portable GPS because that saved me. After that, it was time for dinner. One of my closest friends, Stephen, joined me and brought his Nashville crew and they always make the night more interesting. I had actually met Katie back in the fall when we took a white water rafting and camping trip, but it was nice to be able to catch up with and see where she was headed. For her, it looks like the plans may be changing.
One thing that I always tell to people that are wrestling through a decision is to first, make a choice, and second, hold on to it loosely. Sometimes we lock ourselves into a decision we never should have made. Once we finally get to the point of “making the call”, we’ll do anything we can to hold onto it. It is true that sometimes God allows us to make the choice, but we have to be ready for him to redirect our path if we truly want to give him control. It doesn’t mean that we made the wrong decision and thus need to doubt things down the road, it just proves that God loves us enough to redirect us if needed.
Before I start this next thought, I’m not saying Katie made a wrong decision, we just talked about the point of holding our decision loosely. The one thing I think we lack is the skill of re-evaluating. We lock ourselves into 30 year mortgages, 6 year car payments, “x” number of minimum payments to pay off loans, and we think our decisions are the same way. It’s almost like we feel like we can never walk away from the decisions that we’ve made because, well that’s just the choice we made. I know job loyalty is important, but careers were never meant to be shackles. This may be an “idealistic” viewpoint, but my definition of a career is getting paid to do what you love. And it’s my choice not to settle for anything other than that.
Back to Katie. She has just started into her teaching career and feels like it might not be the ideal route for her. For her, she doesn’t want to go back to that decision point and just take the other half of the fork, but she wants to re-evaluate what her calling was, and still is. She still loves to teach, but is there any other career outside of the education system? It just so happens her family runs one of the premier swimming schools out of Texas and there is a potential market for that in Nashville. As she talked about the possibility, it became more than just a way to make money and moved into a heavy possibility for her to continue her love of teaching. It’s not about abandoning her original decision, sometimes it’s just about re-evaluating.
Whenever we come to a crossroad, we often fret over the decision. Unfortunately, that’s not the only time the decision rules our thoughts. After we’ve made the call, there often comes that point where we question it. Here, we box ourselves into a second decision where our choices are to grit and bear it, or abandon it. We very rarely allow ourselves the third option of re-evaluating and seeing what our “teaching” (or whatever your calling is) gift could really mean for our career. This is part of that thinking outside of the box mentality I love to talk about.
