Ryan used all the effort he had left in him to make his eyes
open to the sound of a baby’s ever-present cry for attention. The sun shone
past the shades, the warmth hitting his face like a cup of hot chocolate on a
snow day. It was early, the break of dawn, and Ryan still had an hour to sleep
before going to work in his cubical. His wife knew this so she rolled over and
rose from the bed, the mattress gently rustling underneath Ryan as his wife
went to attend to their child. The child was six months old; the child
represented to Ryan everything he had worked for from the beginning, the
perfect life. Ryan spent his childhood in the comfort of his home, playing with
cars in the playroom. He spent middle school practicing basketball and how to
persuade a girl to kiss him, and he spent high school figuring out how to
dress, and most importantly, how to impress the ladies. Ryan made good grades,
and of course he went to a four-year college for business, moving out of his
families home at eighteen, never looking back. Ryan always moved forward,
always took the fast train to where he was going. Right now he was going to
work everyday, returning home to his apartment filled with cream furniture,
floral drapes, and white walls. This was the life for Ryan, the perfect normal
life he had always dreamed of.
Sam’s entire body went into shock as he was awaken by the
sickening sound of his alarm clock both buzzing like mad and hitting the floor
of his parent’s home. It was the break of dawn, and time to go to work. Retail
was never Sam’s thing, never was something he looked forward to doing, never
that job that fulfilled his talents. But it was a job, and right now, it’s the
best that could be done… given Sam’s circumstances. Sam threw on some clothing,
ran to the restroom, where he grew up learning how to brush his teeth and
shave, and combed his thirty-year-old bed head. Sam looked longingly into the
mirror, wondering how he got to this point; he was working retail. Sam thought
he knew what he was doing, he thought he had gone to the right college, he had
thought a lot of things that came crashing down, and landed him back where he
started, in his room where his old band posters still hang up from freshmen
year of high school. Sam went to college, for three semesters, until he was
forced to drop out, he was failing. Sam was failing at life, Sam had no job,
had friends in all the wrong places, and he completely devastated the hopes and
dreams his own parents had instilled in him since his eighth grade graduation.
Now, instead of dating around for marriage, Sam is pulling three shifts to pay
of student loans. Now, instead of working at a steady job in the city, Sam’s at
the downtown mall unloading the latest shipment of Martha Stewart linens. Sam
is not going places like his brother Ryan, everyone expected both of them to
succeed at everything they did.
I just hate expectations, because I can never meet them.
When people bother me about school, and want to know why I’m home every other
weekend, I want to ask them when it became weird for a son to miss his family
so dearly, three days at home is enough to get him through the week at school.
I feel pressured everyday to grow up a certain way, to live a social norm; I
have no energy to focus on Christ, and what He wants from me. What if God is
taking me to Dillard’s, to work weekends, to find out that people that work
there, they crave the same God I do. What if God sends me back home, to my
comfortable lifestyle, to break me to a thousand pieces? What if he’s shaking
me to my core as I sit here and type not realizing because I’m worried that if
I don’t go out on Friday night everyone is going to think I have no friends. I
have no room to grow up if the expectations tell me what to do, no room to do
what my heart aches for if my friends are telling me to try this, drink that,
no… don’t do that.
The day I moved into college my sister told me some of the
most gripping words I will keep with me until I die. She told me “God is so much
bigger than our plans… that sometimes what everyone else says you should do isn't
always what God wants for you. If you get there today and you pray and this
isn't right for you...please know that that doesn't make you a failure...it
means that God has so much more for you.” Did you hear what she said to me?
That if God told me this whole college thing, where I think I should be, isn’t
right for me, I’m not a failure? What a radical thought for the world to hear,
that if I can’t make it in college, and end up selling concert tickets at the
local coliseum, I’m not a failure. If I decide that my family is too important
to leave behind at the moment, and I go back home, I’m not a failure. This is
something drastically different than I’m hearing from my friends, who are
telling me that going back home on the weekends…. Like who does that? Grow up
and live your own life. In reality, that’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m living
my own life, I’m doing what feels right for me, because my normal, isn’t yours.
My life… doesn’t need to look like yours.
I was born into normalcy but I was
baptized in grace…. Grace that doesn’t require me to get married and have kids
before thirty… grace that doesn’t require a master’s degree, or the purchase of
happy meals from the lady who just never did grow up. It’s time we listen to
Christ, stop living for everyone else.. and grow up listening to the voice as
still as the air, that’s telling us to follow Him… because he can offer so much
more than comfort in consistency.
