As most of you know, if you’ve been following my life, my husband and I recently PCS’d to Fort Riley, Kansas. This whole Army wife thing is new to me, and it’s definitely an adjustment on many levels. I’m trying to find my place, and I’m trying to determine what my role is supposed to be. Until I fell in love with Frankie 3 or so years ago, never once did I envision marrying into the Army. It was actually my top fear. My #1, scarier than spiders, fear (um, woah). I have a full page about it in one of my journals from 2013 (the semester before I met Frankie). The idea of loving someone who was going to be across the world from me for long chunks of time, absolutely terrified me. (still does, but ya know, God is so funny. Guess that’s why we get along.)

Anyways, point is, I’ve stopped planning too far ahead (or just ahead). If my 20-year-old self drew a diagram of how I imagined my life looking now, and I set it next to a diagram of how my life actually looks now, I’d probably roll my eyes and say, “Oh reallyyy 20-year-old Katie. THAT plan makes sense.” Because I’m really not that great of a planner when it comes to life. (Fact check: true). (Reality check: None of us are). From the deepest parts of my soul, I thank the Lord for disrupting my plans, for putting Frankie in my path, so I would learn to trust Him more than I fear deployments. So I would see that God is infinitely more massive than my greatest fears. The Lord does not demand a fearless life, but He does sometimes demand us to follow Him with blind obedience into whatever it is we fear the most. Already, being where I am right now, in Kansas in the middle of corn fields and K-state fanatics, I am being taught a multitude of things that I’m not sure I would’ve learned from the comfort of my hometown.

Of all the ways God is stretching me, I feel Him stretching me the most in one area. Contentment. I need to have it, and my track record shows that I quite simply do not. I’ve been here for about 1 month now, and I’m itching to DO things. I’m not sure what things, but just THINGS. But I can feel God telling me to allow for this time of calm, of silence, of rest. Maybe you can relate, or maybe you can’t, but what I tend to do is I jump into whatever opportunity is placed in front of me first because I just want to feel useful. OR I go frantically searching for opportunities, and even if I feel a sense of “Ugh I do NOT want that to be how I spend my days,” I often jump into it anyways because at least it’s something rather than nothing. The problem with my usual mindset is that the things I tend to jump into don’t really have anything to do with God’s purpose for me. I end up committed to 10 different things (which means I’m not fully committed to any of them), none of which I actually want to be doing. I jump in so quickly that when the thing comes along that the Lord DOES want me to focus on, to pour my energy, resources, time, and passion into, I’m already burnt out and bursting at the seams with the other things. I can’t count how many times I’ve thought to myself, “Wow, I can FEEL the Lord putting that on my heart, but there’s no way I can fit it in.” I push His nudging aside and eventually forget about whatever it was He was pushing me towards. This is not what I want for my time in Kansas. This is not what I want ever again.

So I’m practicing something new. I’m practicing listening. I’m practicing patience and trust and contentment. Trust that He is not wasting me but that He is shaping me and that where He has me now is where I am supposed to be, doing what I’m supposed to be doing. And that if this ever becomes not the case, that He will nudge me gently, or aggressively if need be. Trust that this is not a waiting period right BEFORE my purpose will start being fulfilled, but that it is already happening. This is the hardest thing for me to wrap my mind around, that I can be fulfilling my eternal purpose without running myself ragged, without pursuing an ambitious career, without filling my days with endless activities.

How peaceful it is to realize that I don’t create my purpose. It is set out for me, waiting to be embraced. I can’t plan my purpose any better than I can plan what my life will look like in a year. There’s some rest to be found in that fact, sweet friends.

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