ultimate plans

The past couple of months I hadn’t really given much thought to my career, not until last week. Two people, on separate occasions, told me that I should think about working for government. Honestly, that idea just made me cringe. I’ve seen how working in government can just lead to frustration. Believe me, if you aren’t willing to bend your principles and throw your values out the window—working in government would just make you feel like you’re in a cesspool of evil. Not kidding. How come I can say these things? Well, my mom used to work in government. She would tell me ‘horror stories’ about how real sacks of money would be brought to Senate for pay-offs, about you receiving death threats if you’re cracking down anomalies and red tape, about how corruption is just so easy for some officials that they talk about it nonchalantly. Sick, I tell you. Just sick. I love my country, don’t get me wrong. And I highly respect some officials who are brave enough to stand up for what they believe is right and not allow the prevailing culture of utang-na-loob and ­turning a blind eye to the obviously rotten practices our government has tolerated ever since its inception. But I can’t imagine myself being in a work environment where, at the end of the day, I won’t be heard just because I’m young and I don’t know the ropes yet. My mom told me that if it was God’s plan for me to work in government, it would be when I’d be in a position of influence—like a senior staff or what-not. Not now, and I definitely agree.

So what should I be doing now? It’s not as if I’m not totally happy with my current job. I like it because it’s research, and being the dork that I am I like doing research. But do I feel fulfilled at the end of the day? When a project ends, everything’s done, reports have been submitted—sure, I feel happy. More of relieved, actually. More often than not though, I don’t see the greater purpose of what I’m doing. The objective of the studies that I do is to basically earn more profit for my clients. Nothing wrong with profit-making, but I do believe there’s more to life than making money. I can’t seem to reconcile my job with what I consider as a fulfilling career. So what am I going to do? Believe it or not, I’m staying. I read in a devotional sent by my good friend Patty last week that for us to be able to be successful in our jobs and to be happy, we should always keep in mind that we are not working for ourselves, for our bosses, nor for our clients. God is our Ultimate Boss, and thinking of Him that way changes our perspective about our work. Yes, it’s important to please the people we work with and work for. But God should ultimately be the one we should be trying to please. He gave us our jobs, and He can take it away. So should I just set aside the plans that I have? The answer is definitely not.

We have so many things we want to accomplish in life. We make grand plans about the things we want to do before we die, like the places we want to visit, the adventures we want to take, the people we want to meet. More often than not, the struggle is not in figuring out what we want to do but when we’ll be able to do these things. There’s always this feeling of not being brave enough, or sometimes simply just not having the time. But when will we ever find the time to accomplish our ‘things-to-do-before-I-die’? Now would be a great time, actually. We don’t need to do big things right away. To be realistic about our time table and our capacity to do these things are things we should keep in mind. I initially had this big plan of setting up a reading program in Bukidnon. I have to tell you, it really is an ambitious project. It’s one of those ‘nice to hear/nice to know’ ideas, but actualizing it isn’t going to be easy considering it’s a personal project and I don’t have a sure organization that can partner with me. I don’t even have funders! Quite humbling to really just take a step back and think things through. I mean, sure this is a great project. But, I had to reconsider the starting point of the project. I initially wanted to implement the program right away—with a set of volunteers, a tie up with a local municipality, a curriculum, etc. I was so engrossed with the long term effect of the program that I never really took the time to think about how I was going to start and where exactly. After a week of simmering, I decided to just take things slow and start small. That’s how most good things start, anyway J I’m resuming my book drive, but this time I have a goal as to how many books to collect, the exact kind of books I need, and how I’m going to market this project.

The things we do now may not be the things we really want to do, but we should never really give up on our bigger plans. Maybe our current situations are just preparing us for better things—greater things. All we need to do now is to be sincerely patient and humbly wait. The future may just surprise us with awesome things to come.