If there were a gold medal for over analyzing ones life, I would be the consecutive winner every year. I over analyze anything and everything! I can spend a whole day over analyzing something that I said 15 years ago, and still feel immense anxiety from that one event. Currently I am over analyzing my career.
See, in some ways I feel like I peaked. I went to a great college where I had a lot of freedom and fun. I studied abroad in Germany where I learned it was possible to feel at home in another culture. I lived for a year in a gorgeous area of France while I also traveled around Europe. How can I do better than that? How do I top the last four years? Do all I have to look forward to now is 40-hour work weeks from hell? Will I now forever be stuck in the Texas heat? Is this it?
I have really been stressing out over these questions lately. I don’t want my life to be over. I don’t want to fall into the miserable trap of the “real” working world. That can’t be all there is? As I sit here typing, after another 40-hour work week, I feel so discouraged. I feel like I am stuck in a small dark room with nowhere to run, grow, or even feel the sunlight.
Sitting in this sadness has not been good for me. It all came to a hilt when a friend’s dad looked at me and said, “You finally started adulting. Well, you had a nice run while it lasted.” Those words where like a punch in the gut. Those words hurt more than any physical bump or bruise I could have received. I was left sitting there thinking, “He’s right. My run is over. All there is left is work from now on. I have no where else to go.”
I brewed over this the whole rest of the night into the morning. Distraught with the way my life was destined to play out.
But God, in all his fatherly wisdom whispered in my ear that next morning. All of a sudden I could hear him saying to me, “Your race is not over yet. Remember you are to run until the end.” It was in that moment I remembered the apostle Paul’s words:
“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. (2 Timothy 4:7)”
My run isn’t over. My run towards eternity will never end while I am on this earth. My chase after God’s best for my life is not some run that has an end. It is a continual marathon. Learning what it means to be an “adult” is a tool not a hindrance. In all truth, as long as I am following God’s heart, the hearts and minds of men don’t matter. In the end it is always going to be God’s word that stands, and He is telling me (and you), to keep running towards glory.
I guarantee I will have at minimum 5 more mental breakdowns concerning my career in the coming months. No matter the breakdown this truth will remain: My run is not over. My life is not over, and God promises the best is yet to come.
Similar Verses to 2 Timothy 4:7
1 Corinthians 9:24
Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way as to take the prize.
Acts 20:24
But I consider my life of no value to myself, if only I may finish my course and complete the ministry I have received from the Lord Jesus–the ministry of testifying to the good news of God’s grace.
1 Timothy 6:12
Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made the good confession before many witnesses.
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