Tag: faith

By Grace, I Made it Here

Kristy

“A year ago you did not know today. You did not know how you’d make it here. But you made it here. By grace, you made it here.”

I have to take a deep breath when I think about where I was a year ago. To put it lightly, it was not the best of times. I had just felt the sting of a potential job I was crazy about slipping through my fingers. Two weeks prior, I had received an email from the company letting me know that I was their top candidate and to expect a formal offer within a week. They were waiting for budgets to be finalized before they could present it. Two weeks passed and my would-be-manager reached out with a long, apologetic email breaking the news that they had lost funding.

I was crushed. Even to this day thinking about it makes my stomach tighten. I had envisioned being in this job so clearly that I convinced myself it was my big break; My ticket to a stable career path. I was more than ready to be whisked away from the uncertainty of job hunting. So clueless was I about the possibility of the job falling through that I already bought my first ($1500) Mac. A fitting reward for the amazing new writing career I was about to embark on.

That wasn’t the first time I dealt with disappointment with my job search. After graduation the previous year, I had landed in a full-time job at my alma mater; an exciting find at the time as I thought my calling was in Higher Education. Since I loved my campus jobs as a student, I figured what better place to start a career than the campus I had grown to love?

Lots of places, it turns out. I learned the hard way that anything can feel like it’s meant to be if it’s easy. And that is exactly the type of job it turned out to be: Easy. Safe. In every concievable way. I took the same route to work that I had taken for the past four years. Worked with the same campus administrators I already had relationships with. Hung out with the same group of friends I had in college because they studied down the hall from my cube (not a bad thing, but safe nonetheless). The kitchen staff even called my personal line on the rare occasions that they made macaroni and cheese pizza because they knew it was my favorite. Everything about the job was nestled deep inside my comfort zone. A place that soon started to feel stuffy and cramped.

Only six months in I found myself wanting something new; something challenging. It didn’t add up that my part time jobs I held in college had more room for growth than this full-time one. As terrifying as it was to look beyond my familiar campus, I knew it was necessary if I wanted to avoid that messy quarter-life crisis no-one talks about.

Flash forward to quitting that job only to have my dream one slip between my fingers. I was forced to face the daunting reality of being out of a job and searching for work full-time. Every interview felt like a lifeline and each rejection like a severed rope, sending me coldly back into uncertain waters. The hardest part was never knowing when the next raft would come along.

This desperate time pushed me to apply to some interesting places. Finding jobs was so difficult that when I did see one I qualified for, I would immediately begin drafting a cover letter without so much of a glance at company reviews. I got into such a routine of scanning job descriptions that I barely paid attention to the places I was applying to.

This is the only way I can explain my genuine shock at getting a call from a plumbing manufacturer for a phone interview. I racked my brain as I listened to the voicemail from a bubbly HR employee inviting me to give her a call back. I couldn’t help but wonder if I actually applied for this job or if they were those spammy companies that try random phone numbers they find on Indeed. I searched my Desktop for a cover letter addressed to this place and sure enough it was there. Written as if it would be nothing short of a dream-come-true to work for them. “Of course they called,” I couldn’t help but think. “I’m not getting traction from anyone except this random plumbing place.”

I just knew that this was going to be a boring job at a weird place and it would be disappointing if I actually got it because instead of a great writing career I would have a career in plumbing, of all things. But I did what you do when you have no other options and it’s your third month without a job: I called them back. And boy, I’m glad I did.

A year ago I could not have guessed where I would be today. I wouldn’t be able to tell you how or when I’d secure the job I was so desperately searching for. I would never have guessed that getting a call from a manufacturer would lead me down an exciting path of account management. I wish I could tell June, 2017 Kristy that things would turn out way different than I imagined, but that they would still be great. That despite missing out on what I thought was the start of my writing career, I instead ended up at a job that challenges me in a million different ways. One that allows me to write a blog I’m passionate about in my spare time.

A year ago I did not know today. But I made it here. By grace, I made it here.

 

One Simple Thing You Can Do to Revolutionize Your Prayer Life

Kristy

Sometimes when I sit down to pray, I have no idea what to ask for. It’s not as if my life is perfect and everything’s peachy. It’s just that there are so many things on my heart that my mind can’t begin to sort through and to lift them up to God in a coherent, meaningful way.

Recently prayer had gotten to be so difficult for me that I had gaping holes in what should have been a flourishing and daily conversation with God. I knew I should be praying way more than I was, but I let the fear of failure hold me back. I had tried too many times with little success to connect to God… so a tiny part of me kinda gave up.

I recently discovered a technique that changed everything. A technique that could help me sort through the clutter and make sense of my thoughts before I went to God. A technique so simple that I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before.

The idea stemmed from a habit I developed this past semester. Often during the school year I would get overwhelmed with juggling what seems to be hundreds of projects, reading assignments and social engagements. It would always be so refreshing to stop in the middle of whatever I was slaving over for ten minutes, open a new Word document amidst the 25 documents already open and just write down everything that needs to be done. This habit becomes more and more prominent during finals week when everything I do can be put onto one overwhelming list of “Things to do before the semester ends.”

It suddenly dawned on me one day, why don’t I use this for my prayer life? So I got out a fresh piece of paper and my favorite pen and set the timer for ten minutes. I went a bit over the time limit frantically jotting everything that was going through my head. Eleven minutes later, with a cramped hand and an empty brain, I was tempted to dive right into prayer. Instead, I opted to let the words sit there for a minute. I wanted to fully feel the effect of letting all my worries drain from my brain to scribbles on paper. I savored the feeling of a weight being lifted from my heart and meditated on nothingness for as long as I could stand it.

When I finally looked down again, all I saw was a long, messy list of random thoughts taking up both sides of a lined sheet of paper. My first thought was that I could never in a million years remember all of it in prayer.  It seemed that all I had accomplished in doing this exercise was taking my racing thoughts and displaying them somewhere concrete.

I quickly decided that the best way to do damage control was to break up my list into colored, relevant categories. For my own purposes during this session I placed them into “Praise,” “Worries,” and “Goals/Dreams.” These sections might be different for you and I’m sure they’ll be different for me tomorrow. They just seemed to best fit all of the information I had thrown onto the paper in a way that made sense to me.

Once I had done that I looked back on the highlighted colors and tried to gather the main themes from them. I found an empty space on the back of my paper and separated my three categories into columns. I then simplified my highlighted thoughts into a few bullet points for each section. That way, things were summarized a bit and didn’t seem like they would be as hard to remember or focus on during prayer.

Once my supplications were organized into simple but meaningful categories I was almost ready to approach God in prayer. But i gave myself about five minutes to just let it all soak in. I didn’t want to rush this. I had been rushing prayer during the in-between times of life and not giving God the full, thought out conversation He deserved. After all, the goal isn’t just to have a prayer life but to have a meaningful prayer life. Those, I have learned, are two very different things.

After I waited a little while, I somehow felt ready. It had been so long since I had been genuinely excited to talk to God. It had become a bit of a drudgery recently because I didn’t feel like I was “good enough” at it and I wasn’t coming back from my prayers feeling renewed or closer to Him.

But this time was different. I found a quite place and calmly addressed God in prayer. It was unbelievably easier than it had been in a very long time, simply because I had taken the time to write down all of my concerns, organize them into meaningful sections and then meditate on them before starting. Instead of rambling I was finally able to tell God what was really on my heart and sincerely thank Him for all that He was doing in my life.

Afterwords, I couldn’t help but feel relieved that I had finally been able to lift my concerns up to Him. Sometimes it just takes an extra step- organizing your thoughts onto paper- to get the message where it needs to go.