If sleep makes everything better, does that mean that the lack of it makes everything worse?
I just finished my last performance season with Turning Pointe, and yesterday after the last show, I was perfectly fine. But now it’s finally hit, and I’m really sad and disappointed. I feel like for all four shows, I was present, but not all the way—they went by far too fast. The times during those performances that I really felt like I could lay it all down before God’s throne was when I was watching my peers from the wings—and that makes me sad. Maybe it’s just that now that I’m one of the “leaders” it suddenly becomes harder for me to participate as fully. I don’t know.
I don’t want to be done yet.
It also doesn’t help that I finally chose a college (and not a day too soon). And of course it wasn’t the school that was the most academic or the farthest away or had the most beautiful campus. Nope. It’s the college that everyone from my school goes to, the college where wingnuts abound and where most of my friends are going. So now I’ll be in much the same atmosphere that I was in all my life, the sheltered CRC West Michigan feel. And I’m really angry, because now I don’t get bragging rights—it’s not like Calvin is a bad school; it’s just not anywhere near as choosy or prestigious as the other two I was considering.
But it’s the right place for a number of reasons. Mostly because I have a passion for my peers at Turning Pointe and I want to make myself available to them as much as I can, to mentor them as well as to learn from them. I feel like we have so many graduates who leave and only come back every once in awhile (even the ones who are at Hope). I don’t want to just leave—I want to continue to lift my friends up and to minister to their needs.
Basically, it’s a case of My Way versus God’s Way—because I don’t want to acknowledge that it’s not about me or my ego. I had this grand plan of being a light in a secular, academically-focused college setting instead of simply growing where I’ve been planted.
I’ve always hated making decisions. And I never really needed to, because there were always clear-cut answers: there were smart decisions and common sense decisions and decisions that just kind of happened—but never anything big like this. So I’ve never had to compromise or give up what I wanted for what God had for me. And I guess it’s a good thing that I’m experiencing it now instead of later, but it hurts. Being chiseled by God isn’t a comfortable experience.
Surrender is something we like to talk about a lot and pray about a lot, but we so often don’t really mean it. It’s so much easier to say, “God, your will be done—but only as long as it matches up with what I want.” But that’s not the way it works. It’s so much easier for me to give a performance up to God and then to go out on stage and hold some of myself back thinking about my next fast change or my technique or whatever.
What’s hard is standing in the wings, watching and worshipping, unseen by everyone except God.
There aren’t any easy answers, so I suppose I’ll just have to do what everyone else does and muddle through somehow.