What happens after you get everything you want?
We have been running a free summer camp at our home this summer. It is lovely. The children are doing great. They are learning new skills, testing their physical limits, and improving their hand-eye-coordination. They are growing in bravery, growing their friendships, and problem solving all sorts of mechanical and social situations. The adults who stay and sit on our lawn drinking while I serve them coffee and try to entertain their babies? They get an informal support group twice a week. They feel immediately understood when they share about just how all-encompasingly difficult this time of life is.
For me this is the closest to "living out a calling" that I've ever experienced. People come to my house, and I find a way to fulfill a deep need that's been eating them up inside. In this case, the need for free childcare that doesn't make them feel like they're betraying their hippy morals. Plus I get to make coffee, lots and lots of coffee, and if someone forgets their lunch my Jewish nature is fulfilled by finding something in the kitchen that I think they might like to eat.
We are living the panacea — giving ourselves to others and seeing positive results.
Also, quite often I'm really miserable.
The moment a child smiles at me because something clicked in her brain and she finally "got" basket weaving? That's followed by a moment in the kitchen handwashing a stack of dishes and cups. And let's be honest, the breakfast dishes and the muffin tin too, especially if some campers showed up an hour early and I didn't have time to bus the morning table. My bathroom? It smells like a camp bathroom. Wet bathing suits leave marks on every conceivable surface in my living room. Sometimes kids cry and I am default mama to them. Sometimes my own kids cry because they are over-extended and they just want everyone to leave their house.
What happens when you find yourself living the life you wanted and it kind of sucks?
I have been thinking about this question for a while, as I see other friends finally "making it" to their callings, not just 'good jobs' but the thing they always imagined they wanted to do with their lives. Smart do-gooder friends finally work for the government. Missionary friends go overseas and find their unwashed masses. Friends who always wanted a baby finally adopt the perfect child God prepared for them from the foster care system.
These people, they tell me that they are sooooo incredibly blessed at this moment. God has come through and given them everything! Everything he put on their hearts to desire! And then they tell me their complaints. The first is how God-awful TIRED they are right now. Oh my goodness, I would LOVE some coffee, yes, I've just switched from two cups a day to three. Also, money is a little bit of a stressor right now. I just had no idea how much I'd need to spend on parking / bribes / advocate services / dinners out. And I cannot even tell you about the paperwork. Reams and reams of paperwork. Just when you think you are finished with one round, there's another email in your inbox / letter in the mail / lawyer at your door with a dozen forms you have to fill out EXACTLY PERFECTLY.
And it's not that God didn't come through. He sure came through fo rus - he gave us what we wanted. He just didn't change the entire world underneath us while he was at it. He gave us our dreams and made them reality. It's just that we now have to live our dreams in the context of reality. And reality tends to be chaotic and frustrating. Other people make difficulties of us. Not to mention the weather.
Also, he didn't magically give us new selves either. I was a little tired and frustrated before, when I was stuck inside a cubicle making money at a job I hated. Now I'm living my calling as someone who's (who'd have guessed it?) a little tired and frustrated. My friends and I, perhaps we thought that living the life we dreamed would magically make us the people we dreamed of being. We saw another missionary and he looked happy, and we thought it was the mud hut and all that time in the sunshine. We didn't think that probably he was the type of person who was happy to begin with.
I am not knocking dreaming. Life takes dreaming. I am just saying some of us put a lot of eggs in a single basket.
So what are my dreams now? Now that life is wonderful and I still remain stubbornly human? I dunno, different ones. Bigger ones. I'll never learn. But I also have small dreams too, now. Sandwich sized-dreams. Literal dreams of sandwiches. To give me practice getting what I want and not taking it so disappointed.