Waiting by the phone . . . again

I'm sitting at my practicum office, just waiting. Waiting for the phone to ring. Again. I have things to do but nowhere to be for another hour and a half, so it's not a total waste of time to just browse webcomics and write on my blog and sit and wait. And it's a good time reflect on where I am.

I'm waiting for another internship site to call me back. I applied to 16 different sites, have interviews with 9 of them, was rejected by 2 of them, and am still waiting to hear from 5 of them - which will happen by the end of this week. It's that crazy time when if I sleep past 8am on a weekday, the first thing I do is check my email because there could be an invitation for an interview in my inbox (and last week one morning there was). I answer my phone at unknown numbers now because it's usually an internship site (though on Saturday it was actually a wrong number). I've been playing phone tag with this one site since Friday, and that's the call that I'm waiting for. The receptionist said that she was just finishing with a client and would call me soon so that I can schedule an interview with this site, and that's what I'm waiting on.

It's a nervewracking and exciting time for me, but mostly exciting. It's kinda stressful looking for low-cost plane tickets and figuring out all the scheduling and travel arrangements, but mostly it's exciting. In January, I will be traveling to at least 5 different states, 2 of which I've never been to before. And one of them could be my new home for a year. Having never lived outside of Texas, this is all kinda crazy for me, but also exciting. I want to move away, at least for a year. I want to experience life somewhere else, with people who think and act different from me, surrounded by a landscape and maybe a climate that is nothing like what I'm used to. I crave this change.

Fortunately, right now this excitement is overshadowing my sadness of leaving, but the sadness peeks out sometimes too. Like last night when I placed my left hand on her shoulder at church, my dear friend of 2 and 1/2 years who is graduating and moving. We spoke a long, beautiful blessing over her and tears filled my eyes. Mostly it was sadness to be saying good-bye to my friend, but it was also sadness for myself as I realized that in five months people who love me will be speaking this same blessing over me as I leave.

Even crazier is this relationship that I'm in with a man that I'm starting to fall for. I told myself that I didn't care if I dated or not this year because I'm moving next year, and maybe I'll meet someone when I move away to a new place, a bigger city maybe, with new faces and other fish. And I really believed that, but I was still open to romance, I'm not going to close any doors because of my impending move. I'm happy and feel such peace that if this relationship is "meant to be", that it won't matter if I move across the country. Yet the timing of it is weird. It's kind of weird of God to put two anxious personalities together in a relationship right when one of those personalities is about to move. But maybe that's the point.

Even crazier about this relationship is that if things do pan out, if we do decide to spend our lives together, my life is going to change drastically. How I imagined my future, my career and the life that I envisioned, will be completely different. I don't know if I'll be able to make that choice and make that change, but now is not the time to decide. Long before meeting him, I've continued to surrender my desires and plans recognize that God could have something different in store for me than what I could dream up, and that is good and exciting and great. But now that I'm faced with this possibility, I'd be a liar if I don't admit that it freaks me out sometimes.

Ok, no call yet. It's time for me to pack up and go. The phone will ring when it will ring, and all of this will work out somehow.