I can only see as far as the lantern shines.

Blog friends, it has been awhile. I've been so busy living, I haven't sat down and written to you. Honestly, I have had so much going on in my heart and in my head lately, in addition to 40 hours/week spent at work and probably 25 hours/week at the theater, that it's been tough to think what to even put down on a post.

To update you: I find myself in a new time of career transition. I have been giving my all to my current job, but we had a mutual agreement recently that it will soon be time to part ways. It's pretty sweet to be able to have a conversation like that and to mutually wish each other well. I am so thankful for that experience.

And yet, here I am, out in the hallway again, wondering which career door to choose.

I am an analyzer and a list-maker when it comes to making important decisions. I write out my thoughts, or sit and talk/pray with a friend about what to do. And I can get myself all wound up in my thoughts and analyses and end up lost in the trees in a dark wood, with my lamp flickering on a small piece of wax.

That's where I ended up today.

I just wanted to figure out what to do with my life, once and for all, and I figured I just needed the creative room to focus and figure it out. So I gave myself the tools to think the way I think best. I gave myself space for pacing around the room. I got out three blank, unlined white sheets of paper and set them out on a blank table. I put a red marker on one, a green marker on the other, and an orange marker on the third.

And then I went into free thought mode. As thoughts came, I picked up the appropriate marker and slashed out my thoughts on the blank paper. The red list was full of job attributes that are a bad match for me (red for stop), the orange list was for job attributes that were somewhere in the middle (orange for slow down, because yellow is hard to see), and the happy green list was full of things about a job that give me life, or where I see myself doing what I'm good at, where I "feel God's pleasure," as the guy in Chariots of Fire put it (green for go).

The creative juices were flowing and I was on a roll...until I hit this mental roadblock. Without going into what the roadblock was, as this is a public space, I went for a different marker, a blue one, and wrote down words to describe the mental wall I had hit. I am sure you have been there. You're in a brainstorming session, and it's high speed like the Autobahn, and then someone goes, "But we can't do that because of ABC," and everything stops. The mental highway becomes a parking lot, and there are 10-car pile ups and flashing police lights.

(Blue for sad.)

I got on my knees on my living room oriental rug and prayed in frustration to God, and there came more words to be written down in blue on that waiting white sheet of paper, words of hope from the only one who can see over this wall, the only one who both holds and is the answer to all of my seemingly impossible questions.

I hit the wall, fell on my knees, and then, in blue permanent marker, I wrote these words in all caps, the most important words I'd written in the whole session:

"I SUMBIT MY LIFE TO YOU, LORD. I AM YOURS. I AM YOUR SERVANT. THIS IS ALL ABOUT YOU. I GIVE YOU MY LIFE. I FOLLOW YOU."