As a kid, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” was a question I never knew how to answer. I’m not even sure I know the answer to that question today, but I’ve learned that it’s ok because God’s plan for my life is better than anything I could plan myself.

I have known God for as long as I can remember, and as a native of San Diego, California, I have always been one to go with the flow. I always trusted that God was in control of my life and that in I would end up where God wanted me to be. My final year of high school, unlike most of my friends, I had no clue where I wanted to go to college. God knows me even more than I know myself, and because He loves me, I knew I could entrust my future to Him. With only a week before I had to make a decision, I prayed and knew that God had led me to Baylor University in Texas. I trusted God, and my experience at Baylor ended up being incredible; I made life-long friends, went on crazy adventures, and learned a lot about myself.  

Four years later, my time at Baylor was drawing to an end and I still had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. I had decided to study Finance because I liked the idea of working with people in a business environment, but I wasn’t passionate about the subject or really anything else I had studied in business. I was six months away from entering the “real world”, and I was terrified because none of the job opportunities I had found seemed interesting or even remotely fun. I wanted to do something awesome, adventurous, and helpful with my life. I could think of nothing worse than being stuck in a boring cooperate job just to pay the bills, but I couldn’t see any other reasonable option. I felt like there had to be a better job out there for me, but I had no idea what it was or how I could find it. Although I knew that never once had God let me down when I trusted in His plan, the magnitude of this new challenge seemed too great and the stakes too high.

One day I realized that, for one of the first times in my laid-back life, I was really stressed out. I asked God for help, and although I didn’t hear an audible voice, I felt like God was telling me “I got you”. I recognized that I had been trying to control my future instead of surrendering it to God, which was really dumb because I didn’t even have a clue what I wanted to do. I finally told God He could do whatever he wanted with my life, as long it wasn’t ministry related because that sounded boring. I like to think God just laughed at me for being so dumb yet again, because of course a job in ministry is exactly what he had been planning for me all along.

I found out about Agape at a Baylor career fair, and the opportunity to talk about Jesus with students in Italy was everything I had hoped for and more in a job. Graduating college in time to work for Agape and raising the support I needed to live in Italy seemed impossible at times, but I knew that if this was God’s plan for my future, nothing could stop me. Now I am working for Agape in Italy, and I can’t think of anything else I would rather be doing!

In Matthew 16:24-25, Jesus tells his disciples, ““Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.” I wanted to control my life and my future, but all I got was stressed out. I am still learning to surrender my life completely to God, and it can be scary, but it’s absolutely worth it because God’s plan for my future will always be better than anything I can dream of.