Blank Page.

Every time I’ve changed my grand plan in the past, I’ve traded the old for the new. Not so this time. This time I traded the old plan for a blank page – no plan at all.

My counselor asked me, “What would you do if you weren’t trying to prove anything?”

So I started to wonder.

Am I really trying to prove something?

Why am I doing all of the things that I’ve said are most important to me?

What is most important to me?

If I could do anything I wanted with my life, would that change what I’m doing?

Who even am I?

I’ve gone back to who I was in high school, even elementary school, and voices echo through my memory.

“You’re such a smart cookie,” they told me. I can see my fifth-grade eyes like windy water wading through that thought. Am I such a smart cookie? If I’m not, what am I?

I see my smiling self in eighth grade holding my homemade model of the cell. Grinning for the excellence I displayed on my deep blue cytoplasm plate of organelle-shaped clay, or was it for the beauty I could see in it? I had no category to distinguish those, so I shot for the stars every time.

What would I have done if I didn’t have to prove that I was the smartest cookie? I am haunted by that question.

In September I said “Enough.” Twenty-two years is enough years of trying to prove myself. I was on track to apply for grad school on December 1, but as fall started to show in the leaves this year, grad school suddenly wasn’t worth it. I didn’t apply. I quit my job, dropped out of research, took my foot off the academic gas pedal.

Jesus said in Matthew chapter sixteen: “Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

Talking about the one who would save his life on his own, Dallas Willard says, “The nondisciple, whether outside or inside the church, has something more important to do or undertake than to become like Jesus Christ.”

In Luke chapter fourteen, Jesus taught the crowds, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”

And the crux of what he meant by that: “Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.”

I am not going to grad school because it was my way of trying to save my own life by proving that I was the smartest cookie, and it was going to cost me my life.

And I am not going to grad school because proving my excellence was more important to me than becoming like Jesus Christ. And, like Dallas Willard says, “Nothing less than life in the steps of Christ is adequate to the human soul or the needs of the world.”

And I am not going to grad school because it got in the way of being his disciple, so I had to hate it. Bearing my own cross for me right now means leaving it behind.

And in the meantime? It means learning how to intend to become like Christ. Dallas Willard (again, I know) says that practically this means “systematically and progressively rearranging [your] affairs to that end.” I didn’t apply to grad school so that I could give myself the chance to do that. It’s an imperfect attempt, but his power is made perfect in my weakness (Paul, in 2 Corinthians chapter twelve), so even this is being redeemed.

I don’t know what I’m going to be doing after graduation, but I do know this (Paul, in Philippians chapter three):

“Whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ.

Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish

in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness of God that depends on faith—

That I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection of the dead.”