May 5, 2007. The day I graduated from college.
The realization has started to sink in that I can no longer call myself a recent college graduate, no matter how much I may feel like one.
Twenty-one year old me, months away from my twenty-second birthday, had no idea what God would bring my way in the next ten years.
I was confident and armed with a plan. I knew where my life was headed. First, I would take the next year to work as much as I could at my two, occasionally three, part time jobs with the goal of being able to pay cash for my Masters’ of Arts in Teaching. After completing that program in a year, I would land a teaching job and begin the career in which I intended to spend the rest of my working career. Somewhere along that path, I fully expected to get married and have a couple kids.
As I have mentioned before, our plans usually do not come to fruition anywhere near how we imagine that they will. I did work as much as possible that year after college but managed to make myself a miserable miser incredibly difficult to get along with. I completed the MAT program in eleven months and obtained a job for the following year, unexpectedly in Spanish and at a school other than Lakeview, the school at which I completed my student teaching. I taught for two years in what I thought would be my forever career but grew quickly to dread each work day. The day I made up my mind to resign at the end of my second year teaching, I knew for a fact that while I was passionate about education, teaching was not the career for me.
Four years out of college and everything I had planned, God had changed. While thankful for the learning experience, I started to plan again. After all, six years was still plenty of time to meet someone and have at least one kid. That part of my plan was still in tact.
This time the plan became focused on history. I would first earn a Masters’ Degree in History before applying to and getting accepted into – a PhD program, moving, becoming Dr. Wood (this was before my name change) and either teaching at a university or becoming a historiographer, writer of history. I would probably meet someone in whatever city I moved to for my PhD work.
Once again, things did not work out as I had planned. I earned a second Masters’ Degree but also, unexpectedly gained a new last name as my affinity for my Armenian heritage grew due to my intense research and study of the Genocide for my thesis paper. I also applied to four PhD programs across the country but one after the other sent polite rejections. This plan “fell apart” in less than half the time as the first one. I didn’t realize it then. I thought everything was pushed back a year. I would work while applying to four different schools. God had other plans.
That April, a week after the tragic bombing at the Boston Marathon finish line, a group of Greenville runners met to run and remember. I ended up running alongside a casual acquaintance of mine and mentioned that I was looking for a job. God used that encounter to help me find employment…in the banking industry.
Thus, I formed a new plan. I started working with numbers and found that I loved it. Immediately I crafted a plan that placed banking as my lifelong career. I researched Masters’ Degrees in Accounting or Banking and Finance. I reveled in the ability to leave all work at work and not have it come home with me every evening, weekend and vacation. I knew this was what God had in mind for me as a career. Whenever anyone asked why I wasn’t using my teaching degree, I told them that my time teaching had been tough but worth it; that time showed me, however, that teaching was not for me.
God changed that plan again. First, He took my job. I made a mistake and was let go. Then I got a new job, this time at a credit union – the contract was not picked up; I was working through a temp agency – so I found myself unemployed once again and questioning what could possibly take the place of my next “lifetime career” option.
Through a series of events that I have previously chronicled, I ended up coming full circle, back to my original life plan. Once again, I find myself in the classroom, teaching English at the school where my teaching career, as a student teacher, began eight years ago.
These past ten years have shown me the folly of “life plans,” more specifically of refusing to leg go of them. There is nothing inherently wrong with making plans. One simply runs the risk of broken fingers from a too hard grip on fallible human plans.
I never would have expected to still be single at 31 or that I would take up running to the tune of over 115 races, 9 of them marathons. I never expected to lose family, Aunt Ruth in 2012, or gain family, Ellis in 2016. The list of unexpected could continue for paragraphs.
I cannot even fathom what twists and turns lie on God’s path for me in the next ten years and beyond.