Decisions Decisions

Making life decisions is...well, a big part of life.  It's especially a big deal when you're in your 20's and 30's and these decisions have a major impact on the rest of your life.  I think its important to have a multi-dimensional view of what these decisions actually consist of.  It's not just who you marry and what your career is.  It's largely the things you choose to significantly give yourself to.

Moving to Saint Louis has been a life decision and not an easy one.  The decision making process has been anything but clean and certain.  There was no burning bush telling me attending Covenant Seminary was the right choice.  Because of this there has been some level of self-doubt.  I want to hum a few bars about the process I went through and maybe touch on the criteria we use for thinking about the things we give ourselves to.

It all began this spring.  The context is I'd been ready to move on with my life, looking for that "calling."  Something I could completely invest in, something that used my gifts and desires, and something that rightly challenged me.  I recently finished college, only four years behind schedule, and my current job, a church internship, definitely didn't fit my calling.  I was sitting down with my campus minister, sometime this spring, and he convinced me in a single conversation that I should pursue Covenant Seminary for this Fall.  There were no plans for me this Fall.  I could stay in town, move to another town, or pursue graduate school.  None of these were perfect.  That day I gave a quick call to my Dad and asked him what he thought about graduate school, and more specifically seminary.  My Dad, who is one of these shoot-for-the-moon type of guys in the best way possible, tells me I should apply for graduate school.  I decide to follow the his advice and my Dads and apply for Seminary.

As much as we hate it, these decisions are often made by being practical.  I would love to go travel Europe for a year, get a Ph.D from Oxford or build a roller coaster made of pure energy.  None of these are very practical.  The immediate options open to me were: stay in town, move to another nearby town or graduate school.  My current town and the nearby town both had practical reasons to avoid living in.  Guess I'll go to graduate school.