Have you ever heard the saying “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans”?

I’m not usually a big fan of such cliches, but recently I have found this one to be particularly fitting to my life.  This is a hard one to explain, so bear with me if I start getting vague and abstract.

If you asked me at any given moment in my past if I would lay out the next few years of my life, I would probably have a detailed plan in mind.  However, if you asked me again a few years down the road if my plans actually came to fruition, the answer would almost always be an unequivocal “no.”

I always wanted to go to a school like Stanford or Northwestern, but somehow I found myself at Wheaton College (I know, the “Evangelical Harvard”).  For a while I thought I wanted to be a Spanish teacher, but now I feel myself being drawn toward law.  I never thought I would study in Chile and Paraguay.  I never saw myself working as a camp counselor or as a receptionist at a mental health clinic.  I never really planned any of these things, but they just happened and for the most part they have been the most formative experiences of my 20 years of life.

Ever since I decided to major in Political Science and do the concentration in Pre-law, I have been thinking about the internship requirement I must complete before I graduate.  My plan was to do a legal internship with the government, like with the FBI or a State’s Attorney’s office.  But none of those options really ended up working out.  Then this week an internship with a very prestigious law firm just sort of fell into my lap, and it seems to be a better opportunity than anything I could have planned.

Here’s the point of all this: no matter how hard I try to control and micro-manage my life, I find myself being irresistibly pulled in an unexpected yet exhilerating direction.  There is this feeling that there is something way bigger than me at work.  This is strangely comforting, because I am a mere human being and my life would probably be a total mess if I was the one actually calling the shots.

Maybe I don’t know yet the direction or purpose God has in mind for me, but I do know this: it will be awesome.  And that makes life one big, exciting adventure.

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