it's not always rocket science.

telling my mom about the topic i wrote about yesterday led her to break it down accountant style which, while it is not an awesomely geeky dance move, was still fairly awesome.

essentially, using a complicated hourly wage/gross income/expense breakdown that made my head hurt a little but that i followed at the time, i would end up paying them to work there.

thank you, no. i would end up making less than i was making as a tutor with no responsibility except to show up, hopefully dressed somewhat decently (i.e. not in my pajamas and clean), and share my brilliance with those who came in.

i think not.

but what the past couple of days have taught me is that what you really want, you get. 

i have been praying since sunday to know the Lord's will for me. i'd been feeling fairly disconnected, like i was going about my days and tackling my to-do lists fairly successfully, and making and keeping goals pretty well, but that i wasn't really seeking to align my life with the path that He had for me. sometimes it's that coasting phase, where you know you're where you're supposed to be and you're good with autopilot for a while. i think those are built into life to give you recovery time. 

everybody needs time to breathe and find their footing again.

but that hasn't been enough for me lately. we're coming up on some big stuff in the teachergirl/musicboy household--moving, new programs, changes of all kinds--and i'm not good with coasting through those. they're too important.

i knew the problem was me.  i was too complacent, too okay with phoning in prayers and reading the bare minimum so as not to feel too much guilt for not doing what i needed to do. but i was also really okay with going to sleep on the really sleepy days without saying those prayers or studying the scriptures.

cue sunday, when my one day off from hanging out with the 18 month old crowd found me in a class about scripture study. 

yeah.

i was resistant at first, even though i KNEW that it was for me. i knew it.  i just didn't really want to hear it.  except what i heard wasn't all "you're wrong, do it better, spend more time, do better, you're wrong." it was more like "make it more meaningful."

so i've been trying.  and i've been praying more. i haven't been doing it a lot differently, to be honest with you, but i've been doing it a lot more consciously and with a lot more thought. 

and what happens?

a whole lot of direction. a whole lot of discoveries. a whole lot of thinking.

and while thinking sometimes makes my head hurt and makes me stress about things i have very little control over, most of this thinking has just been...thinking.  pondering.  figuring out what the best course is. 

and when i see it, it's been trying to figure out how it all will work out.

and when i don't see that, it's been thinking about how this whole process isn't about me figuring out what's most logical. that wasn't my goal. my goal was to know the Lord's will for me.

so when i get the idea, pretty much over and over during the past three days, to shotgun my resume to the community college in collegetown, i do it.  when i get the response that i need to jump through a whole lot of hoops to finish that application, i'll do it.

when i see a bunch of available apartments that are less than what we wanted to pay and have more than we were hoping to get, i see it for the enormous blessing and answer that it is.

when i worry about how things are going to work, about what's going to happen, about how the dollar signs and the price tags and the things we want and need to do will all work out, i remember that His path is not the one i necessarily understand completely.

it's just the one that i want to be on.  it's the one that always makes me happiest.  it's the one that brought me here, to the place that i always dreamed of.

so i keep walking, hopefully a little closer today to that path than i was yesterday. 

i feel like that's a good direction to be headed.