Have you ever had the sensation that everything in your life is too neat or too orderly? Steamrolling down a path you are not entirely sure you want or deep down in your heart is not what you truly desire? Oddly enough, if I take a sober and objective (however much this is possible) account of my life, it seems that so much of my time, so many of my thoughts, and ultimately my actions and response to them are, for the most part, focused on attempting to maintain order and grasping for control over the future trajectory of my life. Would you say the same?
Throughout college there are seasons, in the greater natural world, yes, but also in our lives and hearts as students. The carefree trial-and-error of freshman year blooms into the gradual feelings of comfort and consistency of sophomore and junior year, then into the fading golden light and auburn hues of senior year, which beg you to save her while also asking you to look to a new horizon. That’s the trouble or challenge not just with college but with life. Whenever we discover a good thing we are asked to remember that the most fruitful means of enjoying it is to live in such a way that your roots are not entangled with it. If we allow whatever that good may be to become essential to the way we live it makes it all the more difficult to peacefully allow the pages of our lives to turn. We want all things to remain because they are safe, they are known, so we find ourselves trying to keep the pages from turning by feverishly re-reading the previous chapters instead of simply following the story as it unfolds.
In many ways my time at Boston College has unfolded in ways I never imagined to be possible filled with an array of rich relationships and experiences my former self never could have fathomed, let alone believed, but as senior year gets underway I have discovered a profound need to examine the posture and attitude with which I approach the present: the choices I’ve made, the manner in which I interact with others, and my relationship to myself and to God.
When I confronted this desire to control and grasp the future in my own life, I was struck with the realization that the frustration with orderliness and following the cookie-cutter path was a result of following myself, my own will and desires, though to this day it is still unclear exactly what those are. As you can imagine, following yourself is rather difficult when you don’t know where you’re going. Needless to say, I was feeling rather lost until I found myself walking the Labyrinth for the first time since freshman or sophomore year.
As I walked I found myself becoming ever more mindful of each step. They each seemed to draw to mind a different memory of my time at Boston College. I slowly began to realize how little my plans had to do with them (man oh man, am I thankful for that). It is the moments when I was willing to not be so fixated on planning ahead or controlling every detail of a situation that I experienced the most new and unexpected joys. In those moments, I knew I was walking the path God was unfolding before me not because it was perfectly mapped out or planned but because I didn’t know how it would end: it was unplanned.
It was that day walking the Labyrinth that reminded me of a simple fact—I don’t have to know exactly how to get where I’m going, whether it’s moving from Chestnut Hill to Southie or from Earth to Heaven, because God knows the way. He doesn’t require a cookie-cutter framework to operate, and I don’t have to build one. My job description is to simply to trust His plan and follow His will for my life. I don’t have to have it all figured out, I must simply allow the master artist to finish the picture and you know what they say—a masterpiece takes time. So we must simply learn to be content with being unfinished. It is my prayer for you, dear friend, that you may do the same and discover God’s will for your life and follow it wholeheartedly. May God bless you and keep you all the days of your life.
Julia Danehy is a Sophomore in the William F. Connell School of Nursing a hop, skip, and a jump away from her home town of Fort Myers, FL. With the variety of her interests spanning about a million miles long, in her spare time she can be found exploring history, painting, spending time outdoors, whipping up some form of baked good, or reading anything to do with The Theology of the Body/philosophy in general.
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