What a Girl Wants

I wrote this essay on Valentine’s Day, before any of the recent confusion and fuss about whether to take the job in Utah or not. At that time, I was in a very slow, peaceful place, but then I tried to take control over my life again, to speed it up (instead of letting God handle it), and it quickly spun out of control. You’d think I would learn my lesson. I’m sure if you read this blog long enough you’ll figure out how wayward I am.
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Perhaps I’m feeling romantic today – it is after all, Valentine’s Day – or perhaps I’ve had a lot of time to think lately about what I really want out of life, but I think I’ve come up with an answer. Thinking about that has been the preoccupation and goal of the last several months. Or maybe, like so many times before, what I think I want out of life now is a dream that I will not try to make come true. But for once, I think that this dream is actually attainable so I hope that’s not the case.

When I left Ohio in 1998 to go to college, I went to the Rocky Mountains, to Colorado Springs. After college, I went a little farther west, to Ogden, Utah. And then I moved back to the other side of the Rocky Mountains, to Denver. I had joined the military, like so many others, for the expected sense of adventure and for where it might take me in life. Instead, the only places I’d been sent were the Rocky Mountains (not that I’m complaining about that), Montgomery, Alabama, (I am complaining about that) and somewhere halfway between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore (which wouldn’t have been half bad if the military had allowed me to get a rental car so I could go somewhere besides the dining hall or the base gymnasium). Oh, I almost forgot, I also had the prospect of going to the adventurous Baghdad, Iraq, for four months, but in the long run it didn’t work out, which was fine because being shot at wasn’t exactly the kind of adventure I had been looking for anyway. I guess what I’m saying is the military wasn’t exactly my cup of tea. And so in 2006, I thanked the military for all they had done for me and left it behind.

Since I was in middle school, I wanted to work overseas, doing something that really makes a difference in the lives of the people I work with and for. For a long time, I thought that was the State Department. Now, I’m not so sure about that. The funny thing is, when people ask me what I want most of out life (or maybe it’s when I volunteer this information unsolicited), I’ve almost always been able to answer that I want an old farmhouse, with a flower garden in the front and a vegetable garden in the back. Oddly, with everything in my life that has become redirected, this answer has never changed. Even more oddly, that desire has never been compatible with any of my “professional” ambitions.

The snow is flying today. I say flying, not falling because it’s not really falling at all. It’s flying by horizontally, without really accumulating much. There is a windchill advisory today too, which isn’t that surprising considering that the high temperature is forecasted to be 19 degrees Fahrenheit and the windchill is almost always 10 to 15 degrees colder. Yesterday, it snowed very early in the morning, before I was awake, and then it started to rain beginning around 9 a.m. It rained the rest of the day and most of the night. The temperatures, of course, dropped well below freezing after sunset last night. Around 6 p.m., the electricity went out. The temperature in the house started to cool quickly, so I found a flashlight in the kitchen – using the remaining daylight reflecting off of the snowfall – and dug out every blanket I could find. I spread them on my bed, preparing for a cold night without power. Thankfully, the power came back on around 11 o’clock and I didn’t have to face the prospect of getting out from under the warm security of those blankets this morning to sit on a chilled toilet seat in the bathroom. That prospect is my least favorite part about camping.

This morning, there was a thick layer of ice covering everything, including the snow. If you walk carefully, you don’t even sink into the snow; you can just walk right across it. My car sits outside in the driveway, so this morning after I got up and had a cup of coffee – half warm milk, half coffee, with about a tablespoon of honey, finished reading the rest of the book I borrowed from the library two days ago, and sat looking out the window for a good 15 minutes, I put on some warm clothes, found an extension cord in the garage and took my hairdryer outside. After about 20 minutes of ingenious blow-drying, I succeeded in opening the door and starting the car. And then I spent the next 30 minutes or more scraping the quarter-inch thick layer of ice off of all the windows.

I know that this does not make for a very exciting story, but it’s setting the stage for what I’m about to tell you. When my legs had gone numb, and my fingers and toes were starting too, I actually thought to myself: This is what I want out of life.

By “this” I don’t mean, frostbite. I mean that I want a house that I can call home because I own it, in a region where I can watch snowfall in the winter and go swimming in the summer, where I can plant a flower garden and vegetable garden that won’t be scorched by the heat of the August sun, where I can go to the city if I want to or stay in the country if I prefer, where I have to think of interesting ways to use small household appliances and where I can picture kids playing barefoot in the yard and a husband who kisses me on the cheek when I get home from work in the late afternoon even if we were arguing with each other when I left for work in the morning.

I realize when I write this, it sounds like a very romantic way of life. And maybe it is, but for the first time in a long time, I can picture me living that life. I know it wouldn’t be perfect and it might not even be easy, but I can picture it, which is more than I have ever been able to say about any of my other dreams in the past. And if I can picture it and it fits pretty well with what I’ve always told people I wanted most in life, it can’t possibly be that wrong, can it?

For a long time, I’ve felt like I have been adrift on the sea of life. I haven’t known what I wanted to do for a living, or even where I wanted to live, but I’ve always wanted to do something that was unexpected. And though the romantic way of life I’ve just described may not seem unexpected to any of you, it does come as a bit of a surprise to me -- because I’ve never wanted to have children; marriage has always been something I could take or leave; and city life seemed like more of a fit than country living.

Maybe I’ve been trying too hard to make my life more complicated than it needs to be. I know that’s often the case in my life. I move to quickly to truly appreciate the journey, to hear the answers to my prayers about what it is that I should do next or where it is that I should go. But life has slowed down for me these past two weeks and it’s been quiet in this empty house in the country. I haven’t had any distractions to entertain me – no television or internet, and I’ve limited my radio exposure. Instead of being distracted, I have prayed. I have honestly sat down with my Bible for the very first time and prayed about what I’ve read. I’ve asked for forgiveness for moving so fast that I haven’t noticed the joy of just living, and for guidance about where it is I should be and what it is I should be doing. And I don’t pretend to understand how God answers prayer, but I can tell you that He has been. He’s been pointing out to me some of the consistencies in my life, some of the wise words that people have said to me in the past, some of the people or places or things that have gotten me off track, and some of my hopes and dreams. And I feel like He’s been showing me how they fit together in ways that I was apparently too busy or distracted to see before. And it’s a comforting thought, to realize that all the drifting, all the places I’ve been and people I’ve met really aren’t random at all. But that each one of them has been pointing me in the direction I should go, maybe not obviously, but with a comment here or an encouragement there. I know it’s a premise about the sovereignty of God that I’ve been taught and that I understand intellectually, but sometimes what we’ve been taught doesn’t really sink in until we experience it.

I’m not saying that I have all the answers now, because I don’t. I’m still not sure about some of the details, but maybe the details are the parts I’m not supposed to worry about, as long as I’m moving in the right direction overall. Maybe the right direction is in Ohio, or maybe it’s in Utah, or Alaska, or California. Maybe the right direction means I’m a public affairs officer for awhile longer, or that I go back to school to become a teacher or a professor, or that I get a job in an orchard, tending to trees and working out of a second story office in the bedroom of an old farmhouse that has been converted. Or maybe what I do to earn a paycheck day to day doesn’t matter, as long as I’m writing and loving and surrounded by people who value me for who God has made me. Maybe the only way I will ever really fall in love and get married and build a life is if I open myself up to the idea of being in a place and intending to stay there for awhile instead of always planning for the next place I will go and the next job I will have.

Maybe the way to my farmhouse and gardens is just concentrating on living a life that is slow enough for me to hear God and challenging enough that I know I’m not making it happen on my own.