During my four months in Santa Barbara, God taught me a lot. I'm sure that I don't know the full extent of everything He was trying to teach me, and even what I know would take a while to write here. Instead I'm going to share two of the primary themes I saw throughout my time in Santa Barbara.
The themes are thankfulness, and joy. Obviously these themes are not unrelated. Since I first received the job offer at Toyon in September, I have seen the ways that God has put pieces into place for me. My Church, my home group, being able to live with Ian. All of it was such a blessing. Here's the crazy part. I don't think God has been doing more for me than He was before, I just think God has helped open my eyes to more of the blessings in my life. I am thankful for all of it!
The theme of thankfulness was one I had picked up after just a couple of months. It wasn't until the very end of my time in Santa Barbara that I realized God had also been teaching me about joy. This realization came during my last home group meeting when we studied 1 Peter 1:6-12. There's a lot in that passage, but we spent the majority of our time talking about joy. I realized that while in Santa Barbara, God has given me four of the most joyful months of my life. More than that, it wasn't my situations that made me joyful, because then my joy would have disappeared during the difficult times. Rather, God allowed me to experience joy throughout, even when I was struggling.
There are many examples I could give to demonstrate these things, but I will use an example from my final day at work. My last few hours at work were spent showing my boss (not project manager) a demonstration of what I had been working on almost exclusively for the last 2 months I was at Toyon. Here's the short (probably over-simplified) version of what I had been doing: I was interfacing a routing algorithm written by someone outside of Toyon with our program so it could tell planes where to go. The result of my efforts was something my boss deemed unusable. Granted, it probably wasn't my fault, since I largely just interfaced the algorithm. Still, it was depressing to find out that my work wouldn't be used. In the midst of this, I remembered home group from the night before, and found the answer I needed: God reminded me to be joyful. At the very end of the day, just a few minutes before I left, I saw someone I wasn't expecting to see. Mark, another one of my project managers appeared outside my door to wish me off. He had been at the Harvey Mudd career fair that afternoon, but had left a bit early and rushed back so that he could see me off. I was really touched that he had come back just to see me off on my last day. Once again God brought me back to a humble thankfulness. I left Toyon that evening knowing not only that God loves me, but also that I was at a company with people who cared about me.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment