...Aaaand I'm Back!

Well, back living on the coast, at least... though it's now been almost a month since I did move back down. Still haven't found a job of any great or minor note, and that's kinda what I wanted to touch on.

See, despite it being emphasized in my career counselling class, I have been ever the more surprised at how the first question people ask me these days is "where are you working?", "what are you doing now?", or "what kinda strange company convinced you to move back into the doom and gloom of Vancouver?". Which brings me to my point: while being only wise enough to understand how completely foolish I am, I have been fairly well-convicted that I cannot define myself by where I work at any one moment. It's not what God would have me think, and I surely do not wish to believe that I am currently "undefinable" (but that does add a certain mysterious aspect to my life, I suppose).
Of course I don't blame anyone for having this primarily on their mind when conversing with a hard-to-peg individual like myself. Our culture doesn't allow many personality tests which can give such a good picture of someone's potential ambitions, interests, and overall personality as knowing what someone does for a living. It would take a whole evening and longer to get to know someone, so why not compact it into a question or two about what that person does? People likely have the best intentions in the endeavor to tease out who I am, and the job thing is the best place to start, right?
Yet this definition lacks accuracy. I could take ten minutes talking about what I'm pursuing for a job and where I'd like to be someday, but if someone wants to know another person there has to be a shift in perspective. Sure, I am trying to transition who I think I am into what I want to contribute to society for a lifetime; yet it's only through God's eyes that I can truly see who I am. As C.S. Lewis once said in one of his radio programs, "The self you were really intended to be is something that lives not from nature but from God." (check out http://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/cslewisbeyondpersonality.htm for the whole thing).
I won't let my self be defined by anything else. Not by who others think I am, what I have, or even what I might do. These I've tried only to find them lacking. In truth, we are all best understood from the perspective of what God is doing in us, how He is extracting, bit by bit, our true natures.
To accomplish this is a very long road indeed. Fortunately, some universal truths apply to all of us which help in the journey:
1) God loves us, so much He reconciled our broken relationship by placing all our sin on His Son
2) God made us, wonderfully and fearfully, to be in a constant state of glorifying Him
3) God has a plan for our existence
After these, we each have particular ways where God is moving and shaping us. While each person's path in this is different (and if it's not different enough there are those like myself who try to make it even moreso), I've found a few "tips" to get a better handle on defining myself. First, STOP! Stop looking to pop-Christian, fake-faith junk for spiritual fulfillment. Stop worrying about your life (to the best of your ability). Stop and breathe, stop and look around, stop and listen, stop and notice how life keeps going without you, stop and hear the choirs of angels singing in Heaven to the One and Only Lord, stop and realize that the God of all creation is speaking to you right now if you're able to drown out the noise. Second, take time to find what God is telling you through the Bible, and third, consequently, pray through the passages you're reading asking Him to fill you with His purposes and truth. Lastly (though definitely not finally), find honest and Godly people around you who can speak the truth even when you don't want to hear it. That's what I did, and while it kinda ended up being a largely painful experience, it was a setting-the-bone-to-make-you-healthier kinda pain more than anything else.
So that's my take on the whole "what're you doing now" question... Oh yeah, and in case you were curious (and survived the above onslaught of challenging and potentially confusing statements), I'm currently looking to work at MEC down here in Vancouver while also doing some stuff for the SFU Temp Pool. All the while applying for graduate studies in Counselling Psychology either at SFU or UBC.
Not that I would ever think you'd attempt to garner my personality from any of that information.