I began telling my parents I wanted to be a missionary when I was ten.  About the same time I also decided I wanted to be a teacher.  Throughout the rest of elementary school all the way through part of high school I wanted to be something different pretty much every week: a vet, a marine biologist, a nurse, etc. Some of the ideas cycled around more than once. Some of them were shorted lived. However, always on the back burner was teaching.  It still came around occasionally even when I was thinking about all the other jobs I could have.  As I began looking at colleges, I also began to think about what I really wanted to do with my life.  I really began feeling like teaching was what I was supposed to do and not just teaching, but teaching middle schoolers.

Middle school was a less-than-pleasant experience for me, as it is for most people. I haven’t met many people who have said “Oh, I loved middle school. Those were the best years of my life.” Instead, most people would rather forget their middle school experiences. I decided I wanted to be a teacher for those students at a difficult time in their lives with the hope that maybe I could make the experience just a tiny bit less miserable.  Well, here I am over ten years later with an unused, expired teaching license wondering why in the world I got a degree in teaching.  It wasn’t like I didn’t try to get a teaching job. Toffer will attest to the fact that I spent a lot of time trying to get a job and it just didn’t happen.  I look back over the almost six years since I graduated and see that God had other plans for me.

On the flip side, I also wanted to be a missionary.  God started bringing that to fruition even in middle school (God gave me the great pleasure of leading a little boy to Him on a mission trip before I started high school–still one of the coolest experiences of my life).  And now God is sending us to the other side of the world and as my dream to become a missionary becomes more of a reality, my dreams of being a classroom teacher are passing by.  We brought home a bunch of materials when we came back from training and development in June  and we needed a place to keep them all.  I knew just the tub that would be perfect, but it was full of all the stuff I had saved from college, particularly stuff that I had planned to use when I was teaching.  I had mixed emotions as I pulled things out of that tub to get rid of them.  I’m excited about being a missionary, but was sad about the fact that I spent so much time and energy getting a degree and a teaching license I have yet to use.  We rearranged some things in our house to make our desktop computer, printer, and scanner more accessible (Samuel shares his room with the office and it was getting too hard to work on things after he went to sleep, so our living room now has some office stuff in it, too).  Again, things that reminded me of a dream currently unfulfilled and how I have to let go of that dream in order to fulfill another one.

I’m sure you’re thinking, “You’re young! You still have lots of years left.  You could still be a teacher!” And you’re probably right. God might very well have plans for me to be a classroom teacher at some point. I am planning to home school Samuel and any other children God blesses our family with, so my degree wlil not go to waste.  But for now, I had to completely let go of that dream in order to see this one come to pass. God always works all things together for the good of those who love Him, for those called according to HIS purpose (Romans 8:28, emphasis mine).  I know we are called to His purpose.  And I know that sometimes we have to give up on things we’ve worked hard for, things we really want, things we put sweat and tears into in order to have something better God plans for us. I would never give up this opportunity to go to Asia for the coolest job ever (taking the Gospel to those who have no access to it) to be a classroom teacher. And I guess that’s all that matters in the end.