Don’t Know What You’re Doing After Graduation? Good.নমুনা

Why is it good you don’t know what you’re doing after graduation?

Because God’s not in a rush for you to figure out “what to do next.”

You may feel compelled to get your career going. Sometimes, this sense of urgency comes from well-meaning parents (or future in-laws). Or, this urgency might come from within. In a world with so much spiritual and physical need, how could we justify delay?

Sometime in the middle of the first century AD, an ardent Jew was traveling from Jerusalem to Damascus when he got knocked off his horse. We’ve all heard how Saul, zealous persecutor of the church, was converted to Paul the apostle. But one detail of the story we miss is what happened in between. After his conversion, it would be fourteen years before Paul went on his first missionary journey. For a good portion of this time, he was in the Arabian desert, studying, praying, and being transformed.

There’s a certain absurdity to this. Paul will be the greatest church planter, the most important missionary, in the history of Christianity. And his ministry will be relatively short—around fifteen years or so—before his martyrdom. Why take so long to get started? Why didn’t God get him going right after Damascus? Wouldn’t twice as many years as a missionary make more sense? Why “waste” half of his post-conversion life?

Apparently, it took time to turn Saul into Paul. The one who was so sure of his own righteousness, who persecuted Christ, needed to spend years in the wilderness becoming someone God could use. What looks to us like a waste of time was the most important work Paul could do.

If Paul’s life looks inefficient, consider Jesus’ life. God becomes man, enters a world full of sin and suffering, and then, for thirty years, toils away as an anonymous carpenter in a small town. Think of all the good Jesus could have done if He’d launched His career in His early twenties! Think of all the sick who went unhealed, the hungry who went unfed, the people who never heard the kingdom proclaimed.

Jesus’ timing makes no sense from our human perspective. We’re constrained by time and obsessed with efficiency and results.

Unlike us, God isn’t in a rush. God has all the time in the world—literally.

Maybe our sense of urgency doesn’t come from the Lord. Maybe being in a rush is just as likely to be unfaithful as it is to be faithful. What would it look like to approach discernment with the awareness that God isn’t in a hurry with us? That we might not be behind?

For more encouragement during times of transition, check out Practicing Life Together by Paul Gutacker.