design critiques & a project change.

Back in February, a friend sent me his story going into training camp. I wanted to talk on the phone about it, because it just seemed like it would be easier, but he decided it would be best to message it in case I needed to look back at it later.

Yesterday, I scrolled back through nearly 6 months of messaging threads trying to find it. Praise God for forward-thinking friends.

As I read back over this story, I felt like I was reading my own life right now. There are a lot of things in the works. A lot of journeys I’m on with God, and with my community around me, as well as my squad (who I finally get to meet next week!).

The hardest part for me going into training camp is this: I don’t want my design critiqued, and I don’t want another designer taking over MY project.

In the design world (for those who don’t know, I’m a graphic designer), it is common for one designer will begin a project, then as more projects come in, designers change projects, one picking up where another left off. This means someone else starts the design, only to hand it off to someone else to finish the project.

I hate when this happens. Not that the designers I work with are bad designers. They’re all incredible and I couldn’t ask for a better team to work with. But sometimes my vision for a project isn’t what the next designer’s vision is. And because I started it and was given the project, I think what I want will be the best printed piece. This is never true. The project always looks way better than my own vision for it.

Right now I’m stuck in that. God is critiquing my piece, saying He has better ideas. “But, God…I’ve spent 29 years designing this. I’ve spent 29 years critiquing my own work, designing the layout, and photoshopping the pictures that needed some work. I spent hours the perfect fonts, and making custom fonts when I couldn’t find the ones needed. I designed the perfect life that everyone else wanted from me.”

THERE. IT. IS.

As a designer, I have to design for your clients. I design for people around me. I do what they want, because they’re the ones paying me for my work.

I’ve spent my life doing what other people wanted or expected from me in order to get what I needed to live. What I thought I needed to live, anyway. And there we have it. I am not who God created me to be because I’ve been seeking approval from others in everything that I do. From where I went to school to my major to my current job: it was about pleasing everyone else. I felt the call into ministry at 17, but it wasn’t what everyone else wanted for me: so I left it behind.

But I’m not a designer any more…because I’m leaving my job to go do this insane journey called the World Race. I won’t have a design team to work with. I won’t have Adobe Creative Cloud. I won’t have the nice shiny iMac I just got at work 5 months ago. My identity is about to get shaken, and really, completely stripped away next week.

Honestly…not upset about it.

It is a hard place to get to. To be ready and willing to let it all go, to abandon everything I know myself to be. But that’s one of my keywords for 2018: abandon. Not in the negative connotation of the word, but that I need to abandon my identity and let God work in my life, molding me and shaping me into who He has called me to be, rather than the ‘project’ I’ve made myself.

Some days it is a hard concept to grab ahold of. To leave it all behind in search of something more. But I know that this journey will only be the beginning of a new chapter for my life, that God’s design for my life is so much more than the design I’ve been trying to make work for years. And I’m ready to abandon it all in pursuit of something more.

“For you died, and now your life is hidden with Christ in God.”–Colossians 3:3