Planning out my life

Planning out my life... is a very typical tendency I have. I actually sort of stopped doing this for at least a year. I have done it since high school. When I say "planning out my life", I really mean planning it out. If I'm thinking of orphanages, I'll really look up orphanages and create lists and find out the details and read discussion forums about it. In-depth planning. I want to be an informed decision-maker.

Planning out my life is so complicated. There are too many factors; it's like statistics. We learned today in class that SAT scores are correlated with height. This is probably because more nutrition leads to increased height. And because affluence is also correlated with height. And a million other factors, who knows? This is why there are too many factors to predict how my choices today will affect my tomorrow.

I want to predict what will happen, and so it's a game of probability. What is the most probable outcome of each decision? But somehow the spinner always lands on the least probable outcome that I never thought about. What up life. What up God.

Yet, though I know this, and though I know none of my freshman year forecasts came true, I'm too stubborn to stop predicting and planning. It's difficult to separate healthy planning and wise planning from unhealthy stressing out, because it's not like my heart rate increases when I stress out. How am I supposed to know if I'm stressing out, or doing wise planning? How do I know if I'm trusting in God? I used to base it off of my feeling, if I feel that I am trusting God, but I do not feel much anymore, or just recently...

Anyway, this is a very inconclusive vent-ish post.

A passage from Blue Like Jazz:

[P]"And I never thought after I got married there would still be something lacking. I always thought marriage, especially after I first met Danielle, would be the ultimate fulfillment. It is great, don't get me wrong, and I am glad I married Danielle, and I will be with her forever. But there are places in our lives that only God can go."

[D] "So marriage isn't all that it is cracked up to be?" I ask.

[P] "No, it is so much more than I ever thought it would be. One of the ways God shows me He loves me is through Danielle, and one of the ways God shows Danielle He loves her is through me. And because she loves me, and teaches me that I am lovable, I can better interact with God."

Not a completely unrelated passage; it all falls under the umbrella of life, and finding what you want in it (as in fulfillment). Except that as Christians, God comes first and what you want is what God wants, and what God wants is what is best for you.

And God wants you to want God.