i shall not be a psychiatrist.

i shall not be a gynecologist.

hmmm....

eliminating things without the guarantee that i will find a specialty that i love, that will still allow me to be a wife, a good friend, a mom? does God's plan guarantee me time to go running every day? will my kids grow up strong and grounded in daycare, if i am so in debt that i can't take time off? how have i gotten so far ahead of myself?

i've got to quit this, got to change my MO. it takes a lot of maintenance to stand on a ground of faith, and whole months go by when, by virtue of my schedule of my own choices, i don't sit down and write what's in my heart. i forget what i believe, and i start fearing things i know are not mine to worry about. and then i get angry at myself for doing it yet again...and resolve to stop it, dammit, and of course, that works every time. ha.

time out for me, today. time for me to own up and submit it all again. time for me to remember that the world does not really rest on my shoulders. that God is real, not an imagined thing, even though nobody else seems to know that. most of all, it's time for me to let go. let go and not even allow myself the thought of what that will mean. there's always that last step of control that doesn't make sense, that you just have to jump off of blindly and not look back, and it's there where my feet stick to the ground and i want to rationalize things out. it's exactly there where i spend most of my time. i hate and love that last illusion that if God doesn't come through for me, well, i've built a secret infrastructure that is going to hold me up. i have a plan B. it is this that God waits for me to give up. i know it, and yet i just keep putting it off.

let's get it out there - plan B is a big old sin, a harbinger of distrust, a monsterous weight on my shoulders that, occasionally, i remember i was not intended to carry. when i wonder where my "peace" from God is, i can find it pinned beneath the monster that is my plan B. and then, when i am trying to make a big decision, like what area of medicine to persue, i am caught between a rock (God) and a hard place (plan B). i have two masters. i cannot serve them both. half of the time i am trying to work out the logistics of each path to figure out where my plan B should lie next. the other half the time i'm attempting to walk by faith that i don't have to know how it will all work out.

i. am. exhausted.

in one of my favorite books (addiction and grace), gerald may talks about the games our brains are hard-wired to play with us. it's sin at it's most insidious. how addictions gain power simply because at first, we are determined to plan about how we will give them up, without actually doing it. and then, one day, we say 'today is the day i'm going to stop'. with the first failure afterward, we get angry at ourselves, resolve to try harder, fail again, and then fall hopelessly into submission to the addiction. we either underestimate it's power and assume we can just quit, or we overestimate it's power and stop trying. may says the only way to stop an addictive behavior is simply, to stop. to not do it. and if you do it again, don't rationalize or make generalizations. our brains get the best of us when we try to use them to comprehend something as spiritual as a soul in bondage. one day, it just clicks, and you stop, and you are free.

so i am going to consecrate this day as the day when i'm going to stop. i don't know exactly how to move my sticky feet from ledges, but i'm going to lean real hard; i expect the wind will do the rest.

there's such terrible fear in letting go, but all this worrying is no way to live. and if life surprises me with crazy and difficult circumstances, and i find myself with no plan B... if i find myself in the fire, i will bet my life that God will meet me there. He's been known to do that before.