It’s been about a month and a half since I’ve had the time to sit down and write a blog post, but so much has been happening in my life, both personal and spiritual, in that time. Part of the reason why I haven’t written in awhile is that I have fallen plague to several bouts of writer’s block, but the main reason is that life has just been bombarding me with opportunity upon opportunity, and plenty of reality checks in between. Most of my time has been spent trying to sort everything out, and I figured this blog post would be a good way to process everything that’s been going on – I apologize if this ends up being a hodgepodge of odds and ends, and ends up not making any sense. But here I go.

For those who don’t already know, much of the past two months have been spent moving house. Before I came back home for Winter Break, I moved out of the house I was living in in Pomona, and back into my dad’s apartment in Glendora. Since this move was temporary, I didn’t bother unpacking anything, which resulted in me living a closet-esque room, surrounded by boxes stacked atop one another, empty furniture, and also trying to get away with rotating through five different shirts and two pairs of pants within a span of a month. It was a humbling task, but alas, I again have a full closet of clothes to go through as I please.

About two weeks into the quarter, I moved out of my dad’s apartment in Glendora (again) and into a house in Chino Hills. I currently live with a Filipino family (a single father with 5(ish) kids), and about 5(ish) other renting tenants. I may be living my own weird real-life version of Full House, but I get my own bathroom and I don’t have to pay utilities (yay trade-offs). Two weeks after I moved out, I helped my dad move out of his apartment in Glendora to move back home to Sacramento after living away from home for 7 years. When I moved onto campus my freshman year of college four years ago, it didn’t really feel like the moment that all new college students get when their parents first drop them off to their dorm on campus, since my dad and sister lived in Covina at the time, a short 15 minute car ride away from my campus. When my sister and I watched our parents drive away from that apartment complex in Glendora a few weeks ago, it felt like I was finally getting that parents-dropping-me-off-to-college moment, four years later – and yes, my sister and I were drowning in tears as they drove away. It still hasn’t fully sunk in that he’s finally back home – It feels like he’s just on one of his extended weekend trips that he frequently made over the past 7 years.

In the midst of all of this, I was (and still am) also undergoing the spiritual rejuvenation that I have been in desperate need of, especially after the collection of fraught moments I left behind when Fall Quarter ended. I figured a spiritual awakening would help me tie a bow around the previous few months, instead of having war flashbacks whenever I would think about the events that transpired. What nobody told me was that with spiritual rejuvenation comes frequent existential crises and an endless internal struggle. This began just before I moved to Chino Hills, when I attended the Radiate Conference in Garden Grove with Cru, where Cru ministries from different campuses around California came together for one weekend.

On the third day of the conference, I got a text from someone who works for the Cru International Headquarters, inviting me out to lunch with a group of people interested in a career in Social Media and Web Design with Cru. I initially didn’t intend on going to this lunch, and figured that I would just catch up with some friends instead. As fate would have it, everyone else I knew had other plans, and so I replied to the text message and said I would go with them. My main intention was to simply go and eat with a few people, perhaps make a few new friends, and then return to my life as a stressed out college student. But at that lunch, those that invited the group of us told us about an opportunity to go on an all expense paid trip to Orlando, Florida to tour Cru Headquarters and meet potential supervisors, should we get hired on for a year-long internship following graduation.

Prior to that day, I hadn’t even considered working for Cru, and didn’t really consider it to be a real option for me since I’m fairly new to the organization, and my limited wisdom of Jesus and the Bible paled in comparison to current staff members. I figured, though, that if I could go into a career in social media (one of my many passions) while growing in my faith and my walk with God, the opportunity was at least worth considering. So when I got back to my hotel room, I dug my laptop out of my backpack and filled out the application to attend the Preview Weekend in Orlando.

A few weeks after the conference, I got an email saying that I had been approved to go on the trip. And then I had multiple panic attacks.

Okay, maybe “panic attack” is too strong of a term to describe the feelings I was having as I glazed through the email and reread the “Welcome to Preview Weekend” subject line, but I did find myself often short of breath, reminding myself to exhale every few seconds. As a (hopefully) graduating senior, and the end of my academic career being within eyesight, I thought that this would be my reprieve, my breath of fresh air, that this was a sign that I wouldn’t have to worry about what I would be doing after I get my degree. I went into the trip expecting to have an explicit sign pointing me in the direction I was supposed to go, that I would have one less decision to make, one less thing to worry about over the next 4 months. It would have been so nice if that was the case, but with God being who He is, I came back from the trip more overwhelmed about the future than I was before I went (ask my mom – I may have called her on the car ride from the airport drowning in tears and blubbering “I just don’t know what to do anymore!” multiple times).

Since I came back from that trip last week, I’ve been wrestling with myself, trying to find the distinction between what I want to do versus what God is calling me to do. I know that any plans that I have will always include glorifying God in some way. But the trouble I’m having with that is wondering if that will be enough in comparison to what He may be calling me to. Up until this point in my life, I never truly understood what it means to be at a crossroads. But graduation is just a stone’s throw away, and it has become very real to me that I’m going to have to make some real decisions very soon – and I’m not entirely sure if I’m ready for that.

As of right now, although I don’t know what my future holds or what I even want to do anymore, I know the first step into figuring it all out is to at least apply for the Year One Internship program with Cru. Even though the road ahead of me is filled with so much uncertainty, the one thing that I am sure of is that if I am being called to something, I can’t say no. No matter how much easier and attractive my own plans may be, God’s plan for me will always be infinitely better than anything I could ever imagine.

To conclude this blogpost, I regale you, the reader, with one of the few verses from Scripture that I am familiar with, one that I always keep in my back pocket:

“Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord; Trust in Him, and He will act.”
Psalm 37:4-5