If Lord Jehovah does not build the house, its builders labor uselessly, and if Lord Jehovah does not keep the city, its keepers wake up uselessly. (Psalm 127:1)
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It's been way too long since I published something, and I have draft posts for four of the what? six months I've been silent here. Tonight's the night, folks! Here we go.
In my last published entry, I was talking about hope deferred. I guess I have been silent in this space because I've been wrestling in private. I've been wrestling with my own faith, with the circumstances of life and with a very suddenly busy schedule. On Tuesday, I got back to Trinidad from Texas and it was a hard journey for me because it was layered with all these different experiences that affected me deeply. Over the course of the last year, I've made some huge decisions for my life. I've quit a steady job and gone into full-time private practice, I went to Europe and visited Texas Twice. I was also approached to work out of another private practice and to be on-call at a private hospital. It's a lot, but it's a good lot.
I have been so busy lately that I have found myself very far away from things that are usually really important to me. I stopped blogging, I hardly went out, and I stopped dreaming. I am many things, but dispassionate is not one of them. When my "level head and logical" traits get to the point of making me seem unaffected by life, things have gone too far. This blog started because of a transition that I was making, and that I continue to make as we approach the four year mark. I've been struggling with this idea of free will versus destiny and I'm still in a quandary. Today at supervision, my clinical supervisor mentioned the scripture captioned above about building a house in vain. This stuck to me like glue, and even now the sticky pieces of it seem to cover me wholly. What does this mean?
Cross references to this verse suggest that the meaning of this scripture is more for the reassurance of good Christian folk. God will be with them (He will not let your foot slip - he who watches over you will not slumber, Ps. 121:3; Those who go out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with them Ps. 126:6). On the other hand, it also acknowledges a meaning that frightens me (Your strength will be spent in vain, because your soil will not yield crops, nor will the trees of your land yield their fruit Lev. 26:20). The latter verse is in direct reference to the consequences of disobedience, but what relevance does this have in my 2014 life? I am the kind of person who values my effort, and the effort of others. I like to know at the end of the day that I gave it my best. My parents always told me that that was the important thing - that you really gave it everything. As an adult, I want to know that I did everything that I could. Like an American Army reserve, I want to be all that I can be. It sounds like a cliched statement but it is a fervent hope of mine that I would be everything that I have the potential to be, and that I help as many people as I can to be all that they can be. In some ways, I am learning that this might be an unrealistic expectation.
Right now, I'm reading a book by Deborah L. Spar, an Ivy League professor who is exploring the possibility that our feminist revolution, while widely positive also left women everywhere with some skewed expectations of how we might actually manage our lives day-to-day. I'm not going to give a book review here as I'm not finished yet. I do want to mention my thoughts about expectations though. When expectations are based on positive ideals but they stretch a person beyond recognition, I think that the expectations need to be reevaluated. She talks about the struggle to be progressive and modern and how that means being a professional woman who also has a family and keeps a perfect home. She says that the picture paints a world where a woman has it all, and the reality is more accurately that she might have some combination of "it," but it is very nearly impossible to juggle the modern woman's agenda/schedule/expectation.
In my own life recently, I struggle with feeling as though I might be building a house, and that may or may not be useless. I think a mixture of the dynamics Deborah L. Spar is describing as well as ambiguous religious pressure is the cause of this. Am I the only one who doesn't really get how to be a good steward, as well as blindly obedient, as well as submissive, as well as progressive, as well as anything but single, as well as faithful?
Give me your thoughts, and look out for my follow-ups.
