Turn ! Turn ! Turn !
Have you ever taken a moment to evaluate where you’re at in life, and feel a sense of inadequacy or like you’re behind? You think you’re fine, you’re okay, but then suddenly you have this stifling strike of anxiety that hits you from nowhere, and you can’t breathe. So you sit there, waiting, waiting for this irrational fear you have to subside, so you can pretend like everything is okay again. And then you wake up the next day and go to work and act like everything is fine. But something I’ve learned is that nothing is ever as bad as it seems — you may think it won’t get better, that you won’t get better, but you will.
Lately, I’ve been fearful of a lot of different things — if what I want for my future is going to work out, if I’m going to be successful this time, or if I still have time to become the person I want to be. If everything that I’ve been through served a purpose and wasn’t a waste of my time. All of this worrying has done nothing for me but cause me to stress about things I can’t control, and something I’ve learned about myself is that I’m a control freak. If things aren’t going the way I envisioned them, I think there’s something wrong. But nothing in my life has ever gone according to my plan — nothing. And I’m slowly learning to let go, to let things go from the past, let people go that weren’t meant for me, and to accept where I’m at in life and what I do have.
Kanye West recently released an album — Jesus Is King, and you should listen to it if you haven’t. What I love about Kanye is that he isn’t afraid to be himself, he isn’t afraid to change his direction in life, he isn’t afraid to say he’s a Christian or that he supports Donald Trump. In an interview, he said, “when you remove the fear and love of God, you create the fear and love of everything else,” and that hit me. I want to have this outlook on life, I want to be fearless like Kanye. How many of us are afraid to say what we believe in because of how we might be perceived? How many of us are living to glorify God, or are we glorifying ourselves?
Sometimes I want to delete every form of social media, throw my phone in a ditch and live the Ron Swanson lifestyle. I don’t want anyone to know where I am, what I’m doing, what I’m eating, what I look like, or if I’m dead or alive. I would like to think this is still a possibility, I would like to believe that we’re not so dependent on our phones that we could live a functional life without them. I mean, my dad still has a dumb phone, and he’s making it work. There’s still hope. Do you think you would be more content with or without your phone, without social media?
Okay, okay, you’ve made it this far, I hope I’m making some sense — these are usually what my conversations in real life are like — bouncing from one thing to another. It all ties in, I swear. Enjoy the season you’re in because it’s not forever, everything is temporary. You may not be exactly where you want to be right now, but you’re where God wants you to be, and His plans for you are always going to be better than what you imagined. You’re learning and growing and becoming the person you’re supposed to be. Stop living your life in fear. Stop comparing where you’re currently at to where someone else is. Stop trying to control everything and let go.
