so…I’m supposed to fight?

I can be a pretty pensive and introspective person sometimes. And while I think that has worth, I don’t really want this blog to be steeped in the melodramatic. Unfortunately, dramatic events are occurring.

Design has always been a struggle for me. Ever since I applied to the architecture program at Texas A&M on a gut feeling I have felt like I didn’t belong, like I didn’t have the credentials to be there. Those feelings, of course, are simply excuses. Attacks, perhaps. And I thought I would get over it. Apparently it just gets harder.

I am sure that I am in the right professional. I’m in the right ball-park at least, since many people with architecture degrees end up doing something on the fringes, which would be fine with me. God has made me with the brain and the eye and the heart of a designer, who sees the world in her own unique and sometimes weird way, reveling in the beauty of rusted water towers of all things. Delighting in the relationship between who we are and where we are.

However, its still so hard. Ever since I finished my degree and moved back home to find a job, I would find myself procrastinating. I’d work on busy-work things (like researching firms) ignoring the fact that the meat of what I need to do is sitting untouched. When I finally got up to the task of looking at my past work again to put it into a portfolio form, I am greeted with a punch in the face. After convincing myself that my work isn’t nothing, metaphorically speaking, I learn that my past work IS nothing, literally. The last time I updated my external hard drive with my studio work, this past years work took the place of the last 5 years of work, instead of adding to it. Its all gone.

So after a day of freaking out and getting a hold of old classmates who I did projects with and wracking my brain to think of any where that I could recover anything about these projects, I think I’m calmed down a little.

But this is what really sucks: “We imagine we would be all right if a big crisis arose; but the big crises will only reveal the stuff we are made of, it will not put anything into us. ‘If God gives the call, of course I will rise to the occasion.’ You will not unless you have been the real thing before God there. If you are not doing the thing that lies nearest, because God has engineered it, when the crisis comes instead of being revealed as fit, you will be revealed as unfit. Crises always reveal character.” (from Oswald Chambers “My Utmost for His Highest”, on the day of my crisis)

I was despondent. I felt helpless. I felt alone. I felt like something inside of me was ripped out (Sorry, I know I said I would try to not be melodramatic, but thats what I felt). I felt lost. I felt invalidated as a person.

I was unfit. Truth hurts. Good gravy, I need Jesus.

I need to (finally) get it that its not my strength that will lead me to a job or any sort of design-related success, but his strength. And boy do I need it right now, because Satan has come out swinging. But praise God that he never leaves us. And praise God for a godly man who patiently reminds me of that when all I can do is wallow.