Chickening Out

So if you follow Donald Miller you know that he is sponsoring a contest to win a trip to Portland and attend his conference on his book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. The contest consists of writing on your blog about how you are going to live a better story. It makes sense if you've read the book. It's a great contest for many reasons all of which I am too tired to write about now. The contest expires at midnight tonight and I am officially chickening out.

In my draft folder is the first two paragraphs of what my entry would be if I had decided to complete it and participate. I am a pretty open and honest person, but as I began talking about what all this last year has consisted of and how I would like to move forward both in spite of and because of these circumstances, I just couldn't continue. Some topics deserve an amount of discretion. Once I'm a little more removed from them after a year or two I may be ready to write on them, but I'm not there yet. And the hard part in writing the entry was describing what kind of story I do want to live in. That's a hard question. I know what I want to feel like, but I'm still not sure by what means to get there or what exactly I want to do.

After a job interview last night and today and another one in the books for the first week of September, my future is starting to take shape, but not quite. I do believe God has a plan; it just may not include a salaried job at this moment in time. I think he's going to provide work during this period, but he's also going to help me work through some identity issues and self discovery. I think I'm hoping to learn to gain my identity from who I am and my relationships as opposed to simply what I do, what job I have, and how well I can perform. He knows what he's doing. His time line is perfect. I'll get there soon enough.

So I'm a chicken. But I'll get there. And someday I'm sure I'll write about this period of life much differently than I am writing about it now.