By the time I hit my teens and had sat through enough Young Women lessons, I had my life pretty well planned out: I’d marry a returned missionary in the temple, graduate from college, have four kids, and stay home with them. Two decades later, my life looks a lot like the plan I envisioned as a teenager, right down to the family made up of two sons and two daughters. There haven’t been a lot of surprises– I married the boy I started dating when we were eighteen, he’s working in a field that’s a natural extension of the major he chose as a freshman in college, our kids arrived at regularly-spaced intervals, and our parents are all still healthy.
I realize that I’ve had an enviously easy, even boring, life, at least as far as the big-picture things go. Last year I watched a friend and her husband decide to uproot their school-age children and move to London for a work assignment that would certainly be an adventure, but also an upheaval of the predictable order of their lives. Another friend and her husband determined that the job prospects in his field wouldn’t be satisfying in the long run, and he’s now back in school, set to finish around the time his daughter graduates from high school. Still others have jumped back into the baby fray, years after the cribs were given away and the potty-training books packed up and stuffed in the attic.
Even though I haven’t had to make big leaps– no career changes or cabooses in my life (so far at least), I can identify with the sweaty-palmed, sleepless expectation that comes with small leaps of faith– “Do I really need to take on this new calling?” or “Seriously– another move across the country?” or “Can I handle both full-time work and graduate school?”– the kinds of questions that we all face from time to time. In Heather Oman’s personal essay, “Breathing,” published in the Summer 2009 issue of Segullah, she writes about a job she took as a college student, a job she didn’t want to take at first, that required a leap of faith and changed the course of her life:
It seemed ridiculous, preposterous, unthinkable to take their offer. Live with a family I hardly knew? Take care of medically fragile teenagers? Give up any semblance of a social life—for them? I told them I would have to think about it. They told me they needed an answer as soon as possible….
But sometimes it seems the Lord doesn’t really care what you want. He’s more interested in what needs to be done.
I pulled up to my apartment and turned off the ignition. I sat in the quiet car and looked down at my hands as I fidgeted with my keys. Facing graduation, I knew I needed to find a job, but was this the kind of job I wanted? What about a mission? I’d always wanted to serve a mission. I even had the packet of papers sitting in a drawer in my room, fresh from the bishop, ready to be filled out. Didn’t the Lord want missionaries?
I sat in the car so long I began to get cold. I looked up into the rearview mirror and said aloud, “OK. I’ll do it.”
Oman goes on to talk about the confidence she gained from her work, the way that it influenced her career path, and how staying close to the family she worked with has enriched her life. All because of a prompting heeded, and a leap taken.
What does a leap of faith feel like to you? What are leaps of faith you’ve taken in your life?
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