Sometimes, I feel like I was born with the inability to be still. Whether it's not being able to sit in hour-long classes or wanting to travel for a change in scenery, I am notorious for finding ways to escape situations. Usually, this need to escape comes from fear or frustration, but, sometimes, the situation I want so badly to escape from is the same situation that will grow me the most.
I have always loved change, and I think I might always love it. But, the cycle of deciding to try something new, getting anxious or irritated, and running as fast as I can away from that new thing was once frequently recurring in my life. Recently, I've realized that it does me more harm than good to run away. Looking back on the years that I spent avoiding certain circumstances, I now know that I wasted so much time. I attempted to bypass or get out of situations that I know would have certainly grown me.
This pattern in my way of thinking became so regular that I had to ask for advice, and the advice I was given from several people went a little like," Bloom where you're planted." This is one of the greatest and most helpful analogies I've applied to my life since then. The act of blooming can happen in a lot of places, but not if a flower isn't given water or sunlight. For the longest time, I was trying to bloom in places that I wasn't planted. And we all know what eventually happens to a flower that has been uprooted. It dies. I was uprooting myself, whether that was by dropping a class, wishing I had a different job, or going on multiple dates instead of just being single, and that's exactly the reason why most of my plans during that season of my life crumbled.
God commands us to live as we are called. In 1 Corinthians 7:17, Paul urges the church, "Only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him." God has given you the life that you are blessed with for a very specific reason. If you're continuously trying to uproot yourself from the spot where God has lovingly planted you, you will never bloom. Nothing is a coincidence or a mistake because God is in control. I've seen plenty of people in my life struggle with blooming where they're planted, but, when you realize that God runs your life, there isn't much room to struggle anymore. You are not the master of your own life, and that was hard for a control freak like myself to grasp for a really long time, but embracing that truth makes life a lot better. So let go and let God, and bloom like crazy.
