Overthinking and overoverthinking

Time to process is a funny thing, because you usually end up processing but not the things you intended on processing which in turn opens up new doors to things you need to process. Spectacular.

I spent the last four days in the Dominican Republic checking out a potential ministry site for my school. It was a pretty amazing site and the staff is doing some pretty impressive stuff/work in the area of balancing long term impact with short term visitors/assistance. I'll probably blog more on that later. It was really cool to go around to their different ministry sites (sports/social work/medical/microfinance) but what consistently happened is I just kept stewing in the fact that I'm at the point where I bolt. This is what I mean: Ever since I was born I've never done anything for more than 5 years. Ever. I never lived anywhere for more than five years. I've never had a job for more than five years. I've never stayed in a church for more than five years. Last year was my fifth year at Santa Fe which inevitably starts to bring up this sort of restlessness that works around in my brain like a bad itch. I can't help it. Should I stay? Should I move? Is it even worth thinking over. It's not that I have any desire to leave Santa Fe persay, but the whole 5 year thing has this very real tendency to make me think and rethink and rerethink what I'm doing. Is this really what I want to be doing for decades? Am I having the impact I want to have?

I'd love to say that being in the DR gave me a renewed sense of solidity in where I am, but if anything it just kind of made the whole thing worse. Every missionary we talked to talked about being restless in their job/position. Everyone talked about having these moments when the wanted to move out into the world. The site director even looked me in the eye and said, when you're going to head out into missions God just might give you this "holy restlessness."

I'm not saying I'm going into full time missions. I'm not saying I'm leaving Santa Fe. I am saying that I feel extremely unsettled. Do the advantages of working in a school that provides for coaching/missions/leadership outweigh the disadvantages of an entitled and often extremely surface-y community? Do I have as much of an impact as I think/want to have? Am I even really that good of a coach or a teacher? What if I'm doing these things just because opportunities presented themselves and not necessarily because that's where ministry was going to happen? What if there's something that was more challenging that could really be impactful? Am I staying because it's safe? Am I thinking about leaving because it's safe? Why am I thinking so much?

Basically I'm leaving the DR with a ton of questions. And I haven't even started processing the Uganda trip yet.

Super.