Progress

Yesterday's facebook status alarmed my mother:

Area of growth goal of the moment: realizing I can't do everything. I can do anything, but I can't do everything, and that is a huge challenge for me to recognize.

I wasn't with her, but I bet it went something like this:
1. WHO IS THIS CHILD this is not my child
2. OH NO SOMETHING IS WRONG WHAT CAN'T SHE DO
3. Maybe she's growing up?
4. What's wrong? What can't she do?
5. TOLD YOU SO.

I love my mom. She and my grandmother did tell me so, many times over. I had to come to it on my own though, and I'm trying to. Honest. I'm making a concerted effort to be conscious of this and decisive about things. 

This came very specifically from having a lot of decisions to make at once right now about my life now and next year and sharing a geography with Mike and not and working and traveling and not. Last time I had a lot of important decisions to make all at once, I made them in the wrong order and ended up unemployed and very, very frustrated (though I also ended up out west, which aside from being frustrated with myself over these things, has been really cool).

What are these new and crazy and all at once decisions? I applied to YAV a while back, seeing it as a viable option to get my butt back to Africa and do some service. It's a yearlong service program through the Presbyterian Church (USA). My intake interview was just a week ago, but so much has changed. I was very narrowly focused on Kenya and East Africa, but am now looking at final interviews in Boston, New Orleans and Chinook, MT.

It's me, so I made a list of decisions I was working on, which prompted that facebook post.

• Chinook or New Orleans or Boston
• go to the in-person interviews (not required for domestic placements) in Kentucky, or go to Zion and Bryce when Mike's cousin visits us for spring break
• what to do this summer

While that first one will depend on my interviews in the next week and the mutual discernment process that I am so loving, I have decided to pass on Kentucky (for now, Bekea, I promise I will visit someday), and I have accepted the kind offer to return as Program Assistant at Johnsonburg for the summer (that job being something I love, something that I feel is productive, and lacking other prospects, something I can be sure of for the summer until I start with YAV at the end of August).

Progress, and more decisions to come.