Stuart Smalley to the rescue

So, just when I go and post about how well I'm doing, I wake up and have a day where I wonder what the hell I'm doing with my life. Oh well, I knew it would happen... Actually I am still able to realize that I'm where I want to be, doing what I want to do, but that the process is just messy right now.

I had an interview today for a practicum site, and it was a group interview with two other women from my class - and the interviewer didn't ask us one single question. I asked a couple of questions of him, but other than that there was really nothing I could interject that would tell him anything about me that wouldn't have looked like I was being a giant butt-kisser. I just don't schmooze well. Take me out to coffee, cut the crap, we'll have a good conversation and you'll get to know me. Put me in sensible shoes and stick me in a room where I feel like I'm competing with my classmates for a job, and you are not likely to see me shine. I just don't have that competetive gene -- if you put me on The Bachelor, I wouldn't make it past the first commercial break. Just can't do it, for a job or a guy or even a parking space. But it's easy to get swept up in, and some days I feel like I'm surrounded by a bunch of 23-year-olds who all know what they want out of life and how to get there, and I have to remind myself that's not who I am and not who I want to be, or could be even if I tried.

One of my classmates has a much more laid-back attitude about things like this. When he sends out resumes and doesn't get called back, he means it when he says, "I guess God has something else in mind for me right now." I want to believe that, but I also have mostly given up on ever having a concrete theology of God's intervention in my life. I believe He cares, deeply, but I never know what that means when it gets to the nitty gritty details. But this all loops in with the topic of my OT Writings class last week: Lamentation. We tend to think God already knows everything about our problems, so when we pray we gloss over the problem itself and spend a lot of energy telling God how we want him to fix it. And then, of course, we don't really think God will show up on our timeline, so we go try to fix our own problems. But the Israelites, they worked the other way around. They felt justified wailing, in excruciating detail, over their problems, and leaving it up to God to know what they needed, to figure out how to fix it - which they fully expected him to do.

So, I will get more sleep and eat better and do what I can to keep showing up and putting myself out there, and I will feel free to lament, and to figure out what it means to expect God to show up, and I will stop trying to tell him how I want this all to work out, and we will see what happens. In the meantime, I'm counting on "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me!" to get me through a month of interviews.