God as My Magic Eight Ball

            Sometimes I just feel lost. I mean, Hansel and Gretel in the woods lost, without a breadcrumb trail leading me anywhere. Not to my house and especially not my future.

I think about the future and all I see is a fuzzy image of myself nowhere in particular, like trying to watch TV while there’s a thunderstorm and the image is too full of static to see clearly. I don’t know what I’m doing with my life. I don’t know what I’m going to do next. Will I keep studying? Will I do something else? Who knows?

There’s a lot of pressure on teenagers that revolve around the same question: What are you going to do with your life?

I’ve tried to answer that question several different ways.  Honestly, I have. One day I say I want to keep studying until I’m either sick of academia or can’t afford it any more. Another day I decide I just want to dive into the real world and get a job. Then still another day I get fed up with both options and think about doing something more meaningful, like joining the military or the Peace Corps.

No matter what day, though, if someone asked me that infamous question, “What are you going to do with your life?” I always had an answer. But lately, it’s gotten worse. I’ve been changing ideas two to three times a day. One morning I’ll wake up deciding I want to keep studying and later go to bed deciding I want to go into a specific career. The next morning, I’ll decide on something else.

It’s been difficult for me to accept this, but the truth is that I’ve been answering that question incorrectly.

The true answer is this: I just don’t know.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life. I know I want to be a writer, I know someday I want to settle down and have a family, but I don’t know when either of those is going to happen. I don’t know what will happen in between or which will come first. I don’t know if I’ll keep studying and start my writing career at the same time. I don’t know if I’ll go off to the Peace Corps and get married the moment I come back. I won’t even mention my other dreams, like traveling the world.

I simply don’t know.

The uncertainty has been eating me up inside. I’ve always been an organized person, using a planner in school for my homework, shelving my books on my bookshelf according to genre, etc. So the fact that I can’t organize my future has been driving me crazy, sometimes to the point of tears. Not only do I not know what to do with my life, it’s like I don’t know what to do with myself until I figure it out.

I’ve realized something, though. I may not know my future, but God does.

At church this past Sunday, the pastor gave a message on how we shouldn’t rely on magic eight balls to help us make our decisions, but that we should instead turn to the Bible. I’ve taken this up a notch and decided that I shouldn’t be looking at magic eight balls at all (not that I have been). Magic eight balls don’t know what my future holds. In fact, no one knows what my future holds, not even myself.

But God does.

It’s taken me a while to take comfort in that fact. God knows what I’m going to do with my life. God knows what the future holds. God simply knows, in a way that I won’t until the time comes.

And He’s going to get me there, somehow.

Instead of pulling out my hair over what to do with my life, then, I think I should just turn to God. After all, He’s the one who knows where I’m ultimately going to end up. Perhaps I should just be patient and meditate in Him, throwing aside the magic eight balls in my life and instead grabbing God’s hand and trusting that, in the end, God will guide me to where I need to go.

Besides, God makes a much better magic eight ball anyways.