Being Where I Needed to Be

I have been meaning to write for a long time, and now I know why I could not. I have come to realize that I was in the middle of a season that I did not see through, and that I needed to write about the season at it’s conclusion. Without getting into many details, I had to take my 16 year-old cat to get put down on Monday. It was something that should have been done weeks ago, but we held on to hope for improvement that would probably not come. It was a tough decision, but at that point in his life, he was obviously suffering. It was a relief when it was over, and since then I have felt at peace. I understand now that the cat is symbolic of many parts of my life these past seven years. When I joined the Navy, absolutely nothing went right and I was miserable. I did not have a peace about it, and I felt like I was going through a gauntlet getting the snot kicked out of me. That’s the way I felt for three years, even though I was able to see silver lining. As I went through seminary, I had a lot of trials, but I felt a peace about them as I went through them. With the exception of a weird situation with church leadership at one of the churches I attended, my time in seminary was fairly peaceful. After graduation, there was a point in time when things just fell apart. I am not sure when it was, but months of trouble broke me on New Years Day. I realized that I had lost friends, ministry became draining, and negativity was suffocated me. I lost a desire to do anything and was hanging on to hope that a few jobs at Regent that I was told to wait for would pull through. They never did. My frustration was so bad that I almost resigned from leadership at my church and wanted to avoid ministry indefinitely, that’s how exasperated I felt. None of this is indicative of my faith or my relationship with God. What I had realized is that God was directing me else where, even though I did not know where I was going. So I waited. In the meantime, nothing happened and I noticed that things were deteriorating. Over time, I began to see options opening up for me back in Ohio. So I moved back, and even though life is not working out like I planned, I feel a sense of peace in that things will happen. We have seen spirals like this before. When David did not go to war with his armies, he stayed in the wrong place. When he stayed in the wrong place, he committed adultery. Adultery led to lies, which led to death, which led to denial, which led to suffering, which led to the death of his child, which led to more suffering. The problem was that he was not where he was supposed to be. In the end, Solomon was born from the same woman. So there was something positive that came about, but the negatives outweigh the positives. In the end, I realized that there were too many things that I was holding onto hoping for improvement. Instead of moving on with my hunch, things got worse and more destructive. I needed to realize that sometimes things are meant to die so that life can come to other areas. When a tree dies in the forest, other trees can grow. Life is the same way for us. I needed to move on so that I could pursue what God has in store for me. In conclusion, I am not upset about what has happened. I am recovering from some of the betrayal, divisiveness, and negativity, but I know that it can no longer hurt me. I just have to remember to be conscious of where God is. If he is directing me somewhere else, that means I need to go. Otherwise, his peace will not be present. I am confident that God has something great for me in this next stage, and I am excited to see what’s next.