Yesterday was a nice day. I read, wrote in my journal, played the piano, made art, listened to music, played games, spent relatively little time on the internet, and felt overall rather good. But, in spite of all the niceness going on around me, I couldn't shake off that feeling that I should be doing something more "productive." I check my bank account again and feel the anxiousness for fiscal stability creeping up and suffocating my ability to relax and enjoy life. I express these concerns to a family member and they reply, "Then get a job." They make it sound so easy. In the past, it always was.
There are a few books I've been reading lately that have been helping me through this particularly discombobulating state of being. The first of those is Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water, which I had to read once in college and was recently recommended to me as a valuable re-read. L'Engle, who passed away last September and was most famous for her "children's" novel A Wrinkle in Time, which I read several times and deeply adored as a child, uses the 240 pages of Walking on Water to explore the tenacious question of what it means to be a Christian artist. Though I don't always agree with everything L'Engle says in this book, and though I find some of her many digressions to be rather confusing, distracting, or simply unnecessary, I'm reassured and chastened by her reminder that taking time to "be" is not only admissible, it's strongly advisable, and should certainly not be regarded as a waste of time. She states,
A more subtle time waster is being bored. Jesus was never bored. If we allow our "high creativity" to remain alive, we will never be bored. We can pray, standing in line at the supermarket. Or we can be lost in awe at all the people around us, their lives full of glory and tragedy, and suddenly we will have the beginnings of a painting, a story, a song (108).
Along the same lines I found personal reassurance in Gabrielle Bell's graphic novel, Lucky. Bell recounts the tedium of unemployment, the torment of taking jobs modeling for art classes in order to make some quick, easy cash, and the accompanying feelings of uselessness and degradation. She then demonstrates how she uses the memory of these unpleasant emotions to cheer herself up later on. In one panel, she stands in an unmoving line, thinking, "I hate this! Wait a minute, I'm not modeling. Hey, this is kind of fun!" (9).
Again with the example of standing in line. I guess the image appeals to me because it's an effective microcosm of my situation in life right now. Somewhere up ahead in the future I see Japan and an exciting new life there. In the meantime, I'm waiting. And the more I focus on the wait, the slower it seems to go by.
Madeleine L'Engle says a lot about time: about the difference between twenty-four-hour-a-day chronos-time and the measureless kairos-time in which God dwells and in which we, as poets and saints, are called to dwell as well. I'm learning to focus more on the kairos, to pray and play the piano more often, to write stories and teach myself to juggle (seriously, I'm starting to get pretty good at it, too).
Having a job is important. I can't deny this much. We live on a physical planet that rotates around the sun and is therefor governed by time. And time is money, no? Nothing has ever made that particular cliché more resonantly true than having a tedious eight-to-five job. And I'm sure I'll have many more tedious eight-to-five jobs before I reach the age of retirement. But before and when that comes, I hope to continuously look to Jesus for direction in most effectively filling the hours I am given; to put more effort into serving him and the creative passions God has given me than into serving my bank account; and to watch in awe as he miraculously provides.
Tonight I did something I had imagined I wouldn't be able to do until ten years from now: I finished paying off my student loans. Entirely thanks to a wholly unanticipated and incredibly generous gift, the burden of debt was prematurely lifted from my shoulders and I found myself confronted with a staggering sensation of freedom.
But wait. It gets better.
On Thursday evening, May 8, I received a phone call from Mr. Steve Bishop of Glendora, California's Sister-City Program informing me of my acceptance for the position of Assistant English Teacher (AET) in Moka City, Japan. The program sends six Americans overseas each year to teach English in one of six junior high schools in Moka, providing the AETs with housing, airfare to and from the country, a generous salary, medical and dental benefits...even a bicycle to ride to school in the morning. On top of all this, my dear friend Josiah was also accepted for the program, meaning that I will not only have the opportunity to live in an exciting new place and experience another culture for a year (at least), but that I will be able to share these things with someone whom I'm already close to.
So there you have it: in four months I will be living in Japan, working at the job of my dreams and encountering people, things, ideas, and places that I now can't even begin to anticipate. Until then, I'll enjoy the freedom of not having to worry about student loans. To boot, I also happen to be single, childless, lacking of any major investments, real estate, or basically anything that requires dramatic overseeing or concern on my part. My oh my. What a place to be.
The purpose of this blog then, I suppose, is not just to reflect gratuitously on the amazingness of my current situation, but also to posit this little question: when given three and a half solid months of absolute uninhibited freedom, but also very little money with which to explore it, what should one do? Find a crummy summer job so as to save up a little pocket change for that first month abroad? Say to hell with it and move to Monterrey, CA or some other not-very-exotic-but-still-interesting place to spend the time writing and working at some crummy job that pays the rent but allows no pocket change for the first month in Japan? Or something else that I haven't even considered?
I don't think anyone ever reads this blog whom I don't love. The very fact that you do read it, despite the fact that I seldom have anything interesting in insightful to say, makes you all the dearer to me. And so your input is valuable to me here. Or lack of input, even. I just love you so gosh darn much.
