God is actually interested in what I’m interested in, and for me, that’s a novel concept.
This semester, I have a professor who over the summer evidently picked up the phrase “let’s double-click on that.” He’s been using it in lieu of saying “dive deeper” or “focus in on that.”
For some reason, during this late-night class, I took extreme joy in this phrase I had never heard before. I still continue to smile under my mask when he invites us to look deeper into something using this language.
While daydreaming in class when perhaps I should not have been, I started connecting this “double-clicking” language to a movement in my interior life that began over the summer.
Even many of my friends don’t know (a purposeful decision on my part), but I was a “youth activist” growing up. I was the youth voice of several nonprofits, I hung out at the United Nations headquarters, I traveled and spoke at schools, and helped write books. The reality of youth activism is way less glamorous than it sounds, but the resounding message of my adolescence was “Oh my goodness, Olivia, you’re going to change the world someday.”
But you know what? I might not change the world. And I actually might like that.
It’s that time of senior year where it hits you that you might have to figure out what you do with your life. And what I’m realizing is that I’ve discerned my career path based on this pressure that I must change the world in big ways. Instead, I’m choosing to lean into the mentality of “find your own Calcutta” or the crazy concept that there isn’t one “right” career path––God’s pretty great, he can recalculate a whole lot better than a GPS. And, he actually cares what I desire to do with my life.
I spend my summers teaching marine science at a school on Duxbury Bay, and it’s just about my favorite thing on the planet. One day this summer, our boat was skimming across the surface of the bay, and I took a deep breath looking at the sparkly water. We had been learning about ecosystems, and my thoughts transitioned from the silly reenactments of food chains the kids had just been doing to a more profound thought.
There are a lot of creatures in the ocean that have literally no purpose for humans. We’re not eating those cool bioluminescent critters down at the bottom of the ocean trenches. Beautiful fish like the whale shark, other than minorly keeping the plankton population in check, don’t do a ton for our ecosystems. God crafted some of these things for the sole purpose of making some human’s ocean-loving heart happy. He made them because they would make me happy.
And other than diving deep into things we love and sharing that love with others, what is our purpose? It doesn’t matter how big or small the beautiful thing is; as long as it brings us big love and big joy, then God delights in it.
I’ve been chasing God’s will––or what I supposed to be God’s will––in the form of world-changing impacts. How much could I change the world in this career path? Would joining this religious order limit how much I could change the world? And even as I’m almost halfway done with my Masters in Social Work, I still ask the question, what if this area of social work is not the one where I could be changing the most lives? That’s a whole lot of unnecessary pressure right there.
Sure, God calls saints to change the world. And we will. But we’ll do it by double-clicking on the things we love. I started as a physics major at BC because of the organized thrill of problem-solving, but then I realized it didn’t touch people’s lives as directly as I wanted to. I switched to environmental science to draw on my activist roots. Then I went to journalism, and when I found myself reporting on a homeless shelter, standing outside, I realized I wanted to be with the clients inside. So, now I find myself doing case management at a shelter. It’s hard and it’s heavy, but it’s also not the only place that I could have “made a difference.” I might have been happy to some degree in any of those fields that I tried on.
God cares about my happiness. And if I want to be a saint by spending my days teaching about deep-sea creatures between boat rides on the bay, then I’m sure God will delight in it too. For now, I’m just going to double-click on whatever delights my heart. We’ll change the world by doing what we love, and in turn, by doing what God loves.
Previously the Campus News Editor and Catholicism 101 Editor, Olivia dabbles in The Torch’s writing and photography. She is a senior studying theology and applied psychology and human development with a minor in journalism. She is unashamedly passionate about youth ministry, Haiti, all things charismatic, the Oxford comma, and CatholicTV––where she can often be found as an on-camera news reporter or host of the To the Heights podcast.
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