I gave up dating last March.
I made an actual decision to do so, but it is also sort of a byproduct
of living here. The type of man I’m
looking for doesn’t live in these parts. I don’t ask for much, honestly: a
Jesus loving, country singing, college football fan with a fantastic smile, who
is hopefully taller than I am and loves to travel. How hard can that be?
So what
happens when the year is up? Nothing. There
won’t be a magical influx of the above mentioned kind of men to Changwon, South
Korea. I won’t be on a daily search for
Mr. Right. But I will be out of
debt. And I will have become a healthier
version of me. And I will have discovered
a lot of things in me that I didn’t know existed, both good and bad. And I will
have dealt with a lot of the emotional baggage that I didn’t realize I was
carrying around. I’ll continue to do
that through Bible study with some good friends. I’ll continue to work on budgeting Dave
Ramsey style so I won’t get back into the mess I was in before. I will
continue to love on the kids I teach, and I will keep working to get a handle
on how I react to those kids when twelve of them are running and screaming and
not listening all at the same time. I
will continue learning about things that interest me. I will do a better job of nurturing the friendships
I have back in the States. I’ll continue
to seek God, to know Him more, so that the fruits of gentleness and kindness
and patience can grow within me.
Here’s
my struggle now: I have seen a small
part of the world and I want to see more.
That desire is fighting my desire to settle down. I don’t know what to do. I’m not getting younger. I’m terrified of the thought of being on my
own forever, never getting to have a baby that looks like me, or not being
allowed to adopt from this country I’ll have called home for three years. If I’m
being honest, I am also terrified of exactly all those things happening and
then never getting to see the rest of the world. I want to teach in the Middle East. I want to
drink wine in Spain and Italy. I want to stand where Jesus stood in Israel. I want to go to the Giraffe Manor in
Nairobi. I want to do missions in Costa
Rica and Africa and anywhere else that will take me. But at the end of the day, what I want most
is to do what God wants me to do, and to go where God wants me to go. My life canvas is pretty chaotic looking, the
strokes being made mostly by gut instinct and past poor decisions. But the more I keep on, the more beautiful
the overall picture is going to look as the lines and squiggles of the past begin
coming together to form the picture God has planned for me from the beginning
of time. I have to have faith that it was
all for something, or I am lost.
So please
pray for me. Pray that I spend my last
year here wisely. Pray that God would make clear the next steps for me. Pray that I can stop dwelling on my age and
these feelings of inadequacy, and instead move forward with confidence that I
am where I am supposed to be and that God won’t leave me on my own. Thanks for your love.
