Moving On, Indeed

Something really wonderful happened to me this summer. I got accepted into a type of grant program that is paying for me to attend a month long workshop for teachers in California. I’m actually writing this blog entry from the “patio” (aka a segment of sidewalk with two folding chairs sitting on it, but the hotel prefers a more glorifying naming system, of course) of my hotel room, and I’m looking out into a bay full of fishing boats, with sea gulls calling in the background. The other teachers who are here are all very nice and we’re supposed to be able to take some pretty neat tours here in a few days. Really wonderful stuff.

And I’m completely miserable.

For someone who normally fully enjoys herself at professional development related events and is fascinated with astronomy (the topic of our workshop), I should be thrilled to be here. I should be thrilled at the vacation location aspect of this place (misnamed sidewalk included), but I’m homesick. I should be excited about the new people and sights and I should be completely enamored with the idea of getting access to a nationally recognized observatory, but I’m overwhelmed. I should even be glad to kind of “get away” from everything and just relax a little but plain and simply, I want more than anything to just go back home. So I’m sitting here watching fishing boats sit on the water and I’m trying to figure out just how exactly I’m going to get through three weeks of something that I’m miserable with after only two days. At first I chalked all of this insanity up to the fact that I’m just tired from the traveling and time change and in a day or two, things will pick up and I’ll have a blast. Then the three weeks will be done before I know it. However, I think that something different is happening with me this time that makes it different from all the other times I’ve left home for similar purposes. I was thinking about Darla’s blog about moving on and the words “moving on” have been flitting across my mind for a while this morning. Then I had a bit of a revelation - maybe I'm miserable here for a reason - maybe, just maybe, God is getting me ready to move on (not just move home, ha ha). The last several months have left me thinking about where I want to take my career. Do I want to go get a master’s and get a more competitive job that I’ve been offered recently, or do I want to stay at the position I'm at? Or do I want to take a completely different route and direct my thoughts and energy more towards growing a family, instead of focusing all of my energy on a career and stronger resume?

Suddenly, today, those questions don’t sound so hard to me at all. It occurs to me that God just might have sent me on this trip for reasons completely different from why I filled out the application. I think, that in the midst of this cold wind and foggy air, God is telling my heart that it’s ok for me to put down some potential career ambitions and turn my heart to something else. I think He’s letting me “get away” from everything so that I can see what it really is that I want to get away from. And if you think about it, maybe God uses a lot of “miserable” situations like that to convince you to move on. If He needs you to move on to something else, He’s not going to have an easy time persuading you to do it if you’re fine and dandy with where you’re at. But if you find yourself in a place that you aren’t comfortable in, or just aren’t happy with, then you’re motivated to grow in a direction that will take you someplace new (example: if the Israelites had been happy in Egypt, they wouldn't have been at all supportive of the idea of following Moses out into the great unknown, but God needed them to get to the promised land to fulfill His covenant with Abraham). It’s such a simple idea, but one that I forget sometimes. That is, I had forgotten it until today.

So yeah, maybe I’m surprisingly miserable when I should be thrilled at what I thought would be a blessing.

But maybe that’s a blessing too.