Post Seminary Blues

I pleaded with the Lord to present me with something else, another path. Not seminary. I knew from the moment I'd walked the campus, listened to our guide talk about classes, community, and the Great Commission, this would be my new home. Getting into the car, driving away from North Carolina, I wasn't excited. Instead, my heart seemed heavy and I held back tears as my friends and I drove straight from North Carolina to Louisiana, then finally back to good ol' Texas. 

Over three years ago, I'd pleaded with the Lord because I'd just come back from South Africa and I wanted a path that seemed more clear and less difficult. Seminary would not be that path. I wanted stability. I wanted security. I wanted to be with my family and honestly I'd missed (and would still miss) Texas.

With tears in my eyes and the heaviness lifting, the Lord gave me peace and though I wasn't in a garden, I felt myself say the words and understand their gravity, "Not my will, but yours be done."

***

It'd been a little over a year since I'd graduated seminary and I was texting with a good friend trying to track down a book she'd mentioned from one of the classes I didn't get to take while at seminary. She mentioned how she loved being done with school and asked me how I felt about being done and if I felt the same as her.

I told her it was a relief at first, but then I had what I'd call "seminary blues." 

I texted her: 

I think I had post-seminary blues of being too tired to read but deprived of a lot I learned... It was like I finally got a breath and realized I'd been drinking from a fire hose for two years and had no idea what I'd tasted.

For about a year I couldn't put my finger on this sadness or exhaustion I felt when it came to that path I'd taken through seminary. Yes, I'd gotten the degree, but I'd also gotten married, moved away, and found a job back in corporate America. By all standards of a secure and stable plan, this seemed undeniably better than anything I'd hoped for two years before that. However, I still struggled to see the point of seminary when I'd reach for one of my counseling books and you'd think the book weighed 25lbs. Either I'd grown weak or my education had grown heavy or maybe both?

The fire hose had been turned off for a year and I couldn't tell you what I tasted or if it was even good. I would begin reading and then I'd look around and wonder if the ghosts of seminary past would haunt me because I'd closed the book, with no intention to re-open it.

Lord, help me. 

Typically when I go through these moments of understanding, I reexamine things not from that specific moment, but outside of time. Sounds weird, I know, but I go into my mind and somehow take in a much fuller picture trying to figure out why I came to that epiphany in the first place. 

So there I sat, finally vocalizing (or texting) my turmoil and asking the Lord to help me, asking, "Why seminary?" 

***

Three weeks later and a frantic whirlwind came and swept me off my feet. The Lord placed people, and emails, asking me to speak, to go, and to put my hand to the plow at ministry opportunities again. 

I read through emails and sat on them. I looked at these opportunities and wondered, "Could this be the answer to my prayers? My lingering question." 

Regardless of my skepticism about the influx of emails and opportunities, the Lord is giving me strength and gusto. I'm trusting the Lord to lead me not only in ministry but also in church, in small group, in relationships, in work and in marriage. He's showing me that the fire hose is off and we've watered the field, but now the real work is to be done. The aftermath of education as I'd understand it. You learn everything at one time and then you spend the rest of your life learning why you learned those things and how they actually work in the world--the application part. 

Lifting a seminary book is heavy because I know that I learned it, but now I get to live it. While it's hard to understand why the Lord sets us on certain paths only to push us off of them, I'll never understand. EXCEPT that He knows what I can't see or understand, and He knows the most difficult paths are the ones I typically  walk closer to Him--no, cling to Him--because He will be my safety and security and the reason why I do anything at all. Not my will, but His.