Last week, I got the opportunity to go out to New York City for 3 days for an interview/meeting for a potential architecture job with a great and wonderful firm I've been in contact with since June. It was a long awaited trip and I used the opportunity of being out there to see the city interact with its people and get a picture and a more tangible reality of my possible future life there.
I can’t begin to possibly contain the trip in mere musings here and I apologize for many a delayed response to facebook comments emails etc.; but its taken me a while to reflect. I try not to spit out initial responses that might be erratic and illogical at best through those methods of communication.
So, in piecing together this thing together, as I don’t do with many others I have decided to forgo shoving emotion to the side; but I have given it sufficient time to be of benefit. I lose all the power and depth of what God has been trying to get at in me through the things behind the many tears that were shed as an emotional response over this past week in sorting through what happened in NYC, if I simply let emotion have no part. So I will be honest and bare my heart here while trying to make some sort of sense.
So I will start out with the response I would have posted on facebook..."The trip was wonderful"…it really was...but it was much more than that. I got to see some amazingly beautiful buildings meet some wonderful people and eat wonderful food but God used the last day(the day of the interview) as an opportunity to wreck me and wreck me good. The interview and the firm ended up being a big surprise…totally different than what I expected them to be and what I expected them to say and it forced me to rebuild a lot of my speculation and expectations of what I expected my life to look like in NYC.
The week following the trip was very emotional due to those 8 months of expectations being rearranged and the realities I saw and experiences not even remotely resembling what I expected. It actually hasn’t been really til today a week later that I have been able to reflect without bursting into tears. Which I am still sorting through. Elise can attest to the fact I really have been an emotional nut-job as of late.
What I can gather from the tears though is that for those who don’t know or wouldn’t suspect going to NYC, for me, meant a possible end to a long period of waiting eager expectation hopes and heart…and I really believed this trip to be the coup de grâce to the 8 months in pursuing NYC, the 3 years of strenuous emotional effort pursuing an architecture job, and the lifetime endeavor I have had since I was 4 to become an architect. NYC, though, was not the "blow of mercy(coup de grâce)" I hoped it to be… it was a simple repetition of a word I've heard a lot of for the past few years " wait. "
And don’t get me wrong the interview / meeting went immensely well and I am led to believe I am at the top of their list but a few more things have to go right before they commit to hiring a salary position and I must continue to wait.
And that was way too much for my heart to handle in this week following the trip. That's what I've been working through.
But as I’ve begun to pray through the very casual interview that resembled more of a meet and greet and the conversation I had with the principle about the company and its future and my skills and talents and how they could be used there ; I’ve begun to see ,regaining my emotional sanity, that God is in it in more wonderful ways than I expected Him to be…and He always has been and giving up in this perhaps last leg of the sprint is stupid and pointless. And I'd be a fool to do so when in reality the door is still just as open as its ever been to be sent with my wife to NYC!
And frankly…nothing has changed… besides the fact we're another week down the timeline of what God has for Elise and I...but the truth is I’m still waiting on the Lord and His timing on this thing…but things have changed a little...the door is cracked a little bit more open and the things I’m learning about my heart and myself and the Lord Himself and growing in along the way are changing me in more profound ways than I possibly could write about or summarize here…yet strangely those things are the things that matter immensely more than what we might call big. And I'm glad that God sees fit to be thorough with my heart and prepare me for wherever and whenever He is leading because I know I will need it and He's laying good things ahead of me! And that's exciting and worth enduring for!
JG
