Life choices

I've lately been pondering the direction of my life. Mostly because I have to make some major decisions about it in the next few months. While I don't have any great wisdom or insight into what's making me do what I do, I have had a great deal of peace and reassurance lately.

I want to be a general surgeon, or maybe a pediatric surgeon. Or maybe a river rafting guide or a million other things (that's the subject for another post: wow I hate closing doors). But as I've struggled through giving up things that are exquisitely important to me: time spent with friends, time spent in the outdoors, living in the place that I love, I have come to a peaceful resolution. My life was never intended to be lived as a container for pleasure and self-indulgence. It was meant to be lived as a container to be filled with love and poured out on a hurting world. I'm rediscovering that trusting in God to provide a constant flow of love is the only way to keep that container full. When I try to fill it up, it's amazing how many holes start popping up.

On a similar note, I'm realizing my own inability to meet my goals. I set goals like: be a good friend to these 5 people, and subsequently ignore, put off and occasionally offend those 5 people. I set goals like: pour everything I have into doing well on my surgery rotation, and miss my lofty target by inches, but that's enough that the fall really hurts. I make goals like: get enough sleep and find myself awake at 11pm playing frisbee golf with my cousin in the twilight.

Maybe I should stop trying to set and achieve goals and live life in all its fullness right now, thanking God for the peace that rests in my heart when I realize I'm incompetent, but so loved. And there's no way I can mess things up bad enough to lose that.

So I'm going to keep struggling through my failures, as prideful and unrealistic as those failures may be, and be content to be just another messed-up guy walking with a God who redeems messed-up guys.

If - Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!