I've been thinking about your struggles with yourself and where you might be headed in life, where you should be. I'm fifty-four but have the same insecurities, in a way; I've always struggled with making choices and feeling the peace of doing the right thing; I get frozen at points, afraid to make choices for fear of doing the wrong thing, taking the wrong path, often conflicted within myself about what excites me, what I want, where and what will match with me.
This morning I was thinking hard about it, praying, really....it has an intensity about it because of my stage in life...interestingly, we have that in common: we are both in a more intense stage of life: yours because you are just beginning your adult life, mine because I am looking at the last years of an active, working life. I thought to myself about whether or not God wants us to make choices, or to wait on Him to tell us what He wants us to do. Does He want us to make choices? I've made so many mistakes; I've failed so often. I've also succeeded in some ways.
How have I succeeded? As a young woman, something deep inside of me was always looking for truth, for what is real, for the good. I did not put that in there; God did...but I loved that truth, that good, at times more than others...sometimes I ran from it, but deep inside, I knew that I was in some ways, running from myself, too, my deepest heart. I succeeded when I chose education (college over life in LA), a man (your dad who also seeks above all for truth, following Socrates, following Christ), when I chose life (you and your sisters), my students as subjects of love, no matter who they were, when I chose the Faith over the objections of friends and family, when I chose to love in difficult situations of sin instead of to look from "above that" and reject, when I chose to tell the truth in love.
When have I failed? When I chose to make decisions from fear, and when I chose based on the self isolated from the good of those in my life. But there's more depth beneath the apparently thin line between success and failure.
I think, as I make decisions with Dad coming up, I have to think about what I want to be able to see when I see my life passing by as I die. What I want to offer the Lord. And I thought of the verse, "Where your heart is, there is your treasure." And so now I know my prayer, as I think about my final steps as an active adult: May my heart be in the right place...and then, as St. Augustine says, to "love God [with my whole heart, mind, and soul] and then I may do what I will."
There is an apparent, paradox, though...the deepest choice of the saint is to consistently choose God over the self---God's will over my will. The only place this "Do what I will" and "God's will over my will" meets and makes sense is in a heart given over to God, a heart loving God with one's whole being. So I must focus my life's effort on loving God each moment, and then, unless He makes it obvious to my oblivious mind, I must do my best to choose what to do from that place. I will make mistakes, I will fail, but I think I will be at peace if I try every moment to empty myself and always carry a willingness (in love) to prefer His choices over mine if there is ever a cross between the two.
This is the race. This is the adventure. This is the cross.
Love,
Mama
