Trust - It is a Saturday morning at 9:30. I have been up for a couple of hours. I stopped by Starbucks this morning and got a Viente cup of coffee. The blend of the day was Verona, my favorite. I am in my office in Dallas. I am typing on my company laptop. I have a cool cubicle, a corner cubicle. I have a direct line and colleagues. I know the secretaries and my boss is a really cool guy that is excited that I work here. I wear a suit to work on the weekdays and I have clients. I wake up early to get prepared for the day and I work out or play racquetball at night to wind down. This is the first sentence of the next chapter of my life. I was in college for nine semesters, four and half years. Graduating in four and a half years is the new thing, no one graduates in four years, that is just silly. Four and a half years is the way to go, you get an extra football season that way. I loved my college experience. It was the best four and a half years of my life. I learned more about who I was in that time than in all of life before that. But all of my life before that had led up to leaving home and going to college to discover stuff about myself. College is a time in life that is unlike anything that ever has or ever will come again. It is life with training wheels, you feel like you are riding it all by yourself, but you know that you are still getting a lot of help staying balanced by other forces. But now, at the beginning of this new year, the training wheels have been taken off of my life. I have been waiting for this moment for a long time. I have been working with this company as an intern since the summer of my sophomore year. It has been a one foot in college and one foot with the company dance for almost two and a half of my four and a half years. And now the wait is over. And now the weight is here. The step from college to what everyone calls the “real world” is a great step to make. Everyone should make it. People that are forever stuck being students and never experiencing life outside of a textbook and a library are missing so much. The step is awesome to make, it is a small step in the grand scheme of things, but at this point in my life, it is the biggest and scariest step I’ve made. The weight of the decisions that I am making now has hit me like a freight train at full speed. The patterns that I set in the next 365 days are patterns that the rest of my life will be prone to follow. The way in which I handle the new responsibilities and the new pressures now will dictate and create a foundation from which I will process things for the rest of my time here on earth. I feel the need to sit down everyday and make a step by step plan for how I am going to be the best that I can be. I want to learn how to survive without sleep so that I can be the most productive and hardest working rookie of the real world. I want to know how to go from surviving to sustaining and then from there to being successful and ultimately significant. I, I, I, me, me, me. That is the problem in two words. The weight of the world weighs heavy on me and I am paralyzed by the pressure that I am putting on myself to do it all myself. I am trying to plan out every little detail and orchestrate every opportunity so I can achieve what I want and what I think I need. That is not where my life needs to be. That is not where real fulfillment is found.

“Commit your works to the Lord and you plans will be established.” – Proverbs 16:3.

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight.” – Proverbs 3:5-6.

“‘For I know the plans that I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans for your welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon Me and come and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all of your heart.’” – Jeremiah 29:11-13.

God has got me right where He wants me, in full dependence on Him. If I do it my way and ignore His wisdom and power I am destined to fail in the long run. This life is too complex and too big for me to handle it on my own. I hate that. I want to do things my way and take the credit. But I know for a fact that my way leads to no where that I want to be. I know for a fact that though I can’t see where the Lord is leading and where His way is going to take me, it is where I want to be because it is where He is. By leading me one step at a time and showing me what I need to know, God is establishing and deepening our relationship. He desires an intimate friendship with me. That is something that I will never understand, but I know He does. The challenges in this life are an opportunity to know God better. To trust Him more. Trust. What a tough thing to do, but when it comes down to it, it is the only option that makes sense.