Does adulthood stifle you with niggling regret from your younger years?  If given the chance, what would you change if you could go back in time to your college years?

Hmmmmm……..Ok maybe don’t answer that.

I lived many years with a small question about the degree choice I made in college.  A question of “what if?” just stayed in a small crevice in my brain. Had I chosen wrong? Had I wasted years of my life in not being prepared for what God had for me?

Only since diving in once again to the serious blogging world the last few months can I see that God prepared me perfectly for now.  For this moment.

Sometimes it takes faithful (and often painful) patience to see God’s handiwork, to understand what He’s doing.  I have had to come out on the other side of this ‘so-called’ bad decision to see that it wasn’t a bad decision at all.  He prepared me for today.

He redeemed my niggling regret.

Here is my post from years ago:

niggling /n’ɪɡəlɪŋ/
Synonyms:  adjective: petty, trifling, trivial
1. A niggling injury or worry is small but bothers you over a long period of time.

Adjective usu ADJ n
◦Both players have been suffering from niggling injuries.
◦…a niggling worry that the cheap car is also the one that will cause endless trouble. quality; @; emotion
 

He pruned, He took away my ‘comfortable’.

In the place of my familiar surroundings and people, He gave me unexpected peacefulness to rediscover a passion, long ago cast by the wayside in the busyness of life.

But having time to think also meant having time to regret.

The back story:

 

I think it was my third year of college at Texas A&M University when I began to wonder about my chosen degree track. I’d decided on a business degree, and I was a little torn between a marketing or IT career path. 

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But, for some reason, even though I tried to pound them back, little furry doubts kept popping their heads from the ground.  (Remember the “Whack a Mole” game at arcades?)

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Writing had always been an outlet for me. Writing was fun. My classmates complained and struggled with the dreaded English courses (English 101, and Technical Writing were both considered ‘weed out’ classes). I breezed through them, never quite ‘getting’ what all the fuss was about. I think I might have felt guilty for my A’s when it seemed I didn’t even work for them. I developed special relationships with my profs from those classes. 

 

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One professor, in particular, talked to me about changing my major to English………

 

Here’s the funny part.  I received exactly zero job offers upon graduation. 

What if? 

Time and distance are gifts sometimes, that allow us to see the past with 20/20 lenses.

I am swimming hard in this big pool of blogging.  The last few months I am learning more than ever about what it takes to be a career blogger.  In a lot of ways, I am back in college, dog-paddling in the technical aspects of this world.  

If blogging is the duck in the water, writing is the part of blogging that you see.  It’s the pretty part, smoothly gliding on the quiet pond.  The technical and marketing parts are what you don’t see under the water, two feet furiously paddling, actually making the duck move.

I see the past so clearly now and I see how God is using my choices for His glory.  He’s redeemed them.

HE knew.

[He will] give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the garment of praise instead of a  faint spirit; that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified.     Isaiah 61: 3