More Than a So-and-So

I must be a slow learner when it comes to faith. I feel like God is teaching me the same things over and over again. Yesterday I struggled for the millionth time with feelings of worthlessness, of being discouraged because I'm unemployed, of wondering what the future holds for me. While going through my old entries to label them, I ran across this from last September:

Often I forget that I actually have talent. Good ideas. Anything worth saying. The ability to influence others.

I was reminded today that I have all these things. Not because I'm great, but because of what God has given me.

For far too long, I have been paralyzed by my fear of failure. I don't want to live that way anymore.

I will take the plunge. I don't know when or where or what, but when I feel that God is guiding me someplace that requires my faith in Him, that may require me putting myself out there and possibly getting rejected, I will go. I have for too long been afraid of opportunity, as great and awesome as it can be. Well, opportunity can come any day now and if it's what God is leading me, that's where I need to be.

And the awesome news? He promises He'll be right there with me. His promise is that He has a plan and purpose for me. All I have to do is take the plunge... and follow Him.

I have no idea where I'm heading. I have no idea when I'll have a job, if it'll be a "just to get by" job or a job I love, or something else beyond my imagination may even come up. I don't know if I need to be more aggressive in my search, or less picky, or if something is just going to fall into my lap one day. I'm trying so hard to write, and I do believe that is actually going to go somewhere, but it's going to take time. Even if I finish my current draft of my novel in the next few months (which is conceivable), I then have to have several people read through it to make suggestions and edit things, and then I would probably have to rewrite it once or twice, edit it again, go through the publishing process (I'm planning to self-publish), and I imagine 2011 is the earliest I would see something come about from all this, and that seems so far away.

And that's just assuming I actually get through this. And there I go again. Garrett told me the other day to not shortchange myself. I used to be quite confident. I think a lot of it went out the window my junior year of college. Then my ego left the building probably after my job interview that didn't work out. I guess this is the part where I need to remember that if I am to be confident in anything, it's in God, and that anything I can do is through Him.

My Facebook status from yesterday says it all. I have been staring down the demons who have been screaming I'm just another so-and-so. I don't want to give up hope. I don't want to lose faith. I want to prove them wrong. I want to prove that God can work even through me.