The Winning Life

My first Sunday at Bethel Baptist has been a special day. Because the Baptist community in the Czech Republic is so small, churches have made deliberate decisions to be in fellowship with each other. Today, an entire church from Aš (ash), a village several hours to the southwest, came to worship at Bethel. Aš lead the service, with singing from their praise band and choir, and a sermon delivered by their pastor.

The message in today’s sermon was both compelling and familiar, an old reminder with new meaning. The message was about ‘the winning life’ and how we can only achieve that with God. With his wide-ranging intonation and frequent outbursts, the pastor made enough noise that Martin’s line-by-line English translation of the sermon was not a very big distraction to people around us. Sitting in a whitewashed Old World church, listening to lilting Czech and intermittent English translations, gave words I have heard before a new resonance, like a familiar song in a different key.

When the pastor said that the winning life comes from daily, even constant, time with Christ, not only during our crises but also during our triumphs, I thought about my life back in America and the life I will have here in CZ. I still do not know what I am doing in seminary. An ambiguous future is fun and exploratory in a liberal arts college, but terrifying in grad school. Figuring out my future was most of my motivation for coming abroad this summer. I wanted to have a hands-on time for discernment. I want to discern the future that God has for me—will I be involved in international work? Will I teach? Will I teach English? Will I pursue Slavic studies? I planned on my time in CZ answering at least one of those questions, and hopefully more. I want this certainty about my future so that I can feel like I’m not wasting time in seminary, so I won’t come out with yet another degree that I can’t use in the real world. To me, ‘the winning life’ involves having a satisfying, ‘real’ job that can pay bills that are bigger than pizza with friends on a Friday night.

What I realized during the sermon was that I might not figure my life out this summer. I might find that I have a skill and a passion for teaching English; I may be out of my element and have to grin and bear it for two months. Either way how can I use that isolated, unique experience to be sure about the rest of my life? Maybe I should rephrase—how can I be certain?

I realized that I am going about this life-discernment business the wrong way. Getting hands-on experience in a possible field is a good idea. I am so glad to have these two months with guided, low-stakes practice. However, if I truly believe that God has a plan for my life, then discernment might be more about following God’s will step by step, as it is laid out before me, rather than trying to rationally map out my life the most logical way. I feel very lucky to know that God is real, that God “knows the plans God has for us, plans to prosper and not to fail us, plans to give us hope and a future.” Why don’t I take advantage of this blessed assurance, sit back, and enjoy this ride, even if it doesn’t result in a five-year plan?