A Season of Worrying about the Future

In this blog post I will be sharing about a season of worrying that I have been through.

When I had just turned 16 I started studying Animal Care at college with my sister. I studied there for 2 years, but it was not exactly the career that I wanted to pursue further. In the beginning of 2020 I applied to another course and this was just before covid and the lockdowns. I was not exactly sure of this course, but at that moment there were not any other courses that I was interested in. The other plan I had was to keep on studying Animal Care for another year or so because then I could still keep on studying Maths and English, which is why I really needed to continue with my studies. Later I found out that it was not going to work for me to keep on studying at Animal Care. At first I wasn’t exactly sure what to do because it was one of the two choices that I was thinking of doing in September. But as I look back I am very thankful for what felt like God’s redirection. In the long run it wouldn’t have been helpful for me to continue on that course.

I decided to go forward with my first choice and the course that I had already applied for, but I wasn’t exactly sure if I really wanted to do the course. I got a conditional offer on this course sometime during the summer. When it was time for the results day during August I found out that this course wasn’t going to work out for me anyway because my grades were too low for the course. It felt like I had no other options to choose from during that Autumn, so I decided to take a gap year. I had not planned to take a year off from my studies and at first it was quite hard for me. My gap year was good for me though. I started blogging which I don’t think that I would have done if I had continued at college that year. I grew quite a lot as a person and God also taught me a lot during this time.

It was also a season of worrying about my future and what I wanted to do in life. During my gap year I started researching about my next steps. I felt like I either wanted to do an apprenticeship or somehow find a way to continue with my Maths and English. Some days I researched a lot, but most of the time this would get me nowhere and it almost felt like every door closed instead. This would only cause me anxiety. I prayed about it a lot, but I found it very hard to trust God through this and it was hard at times to completely surrender the worry to God. Some days I dealt with the worry and anxiety by not trying to think about my next steps and I tried to distract myself with by doing something else. I found it very hard to see a way forward from this season.

During the summer in 2021 I found a part time Maths and English course through the college website and I decided to apply to that course. I really wanted to do an apprenticeship but I wasn’t sure if I was going to find one or get accepted on to one. Applying to this course felt like a step forward in the right direction for me. I started college again that September, but the worrying and the anxiety didn’t stop because I began to study at college. My initial plan was to only study Maths and English for about a year and then I was hoping to find something else. I had a few thoughts about what I maybe wanted to do, but I really wasn’t sure so this still caused some anxiety for me during my first year back at college after my gap year. I continued to do some research about this, but it wasn’t until about April of 2022 when I finally felt that I had found something that I sort of felt peace about.

At the end of August I started studying an online course and a few weeks after I continued to study one one of the classes from the previous academic year at college. I found something that worked very well for me, and I became less anxious.

This has been a vey hard season to go through. But I have also learned a lot during this season, and I think that some of the lessons and struggles from these years will be helpful for future seasons that I might go through. God has taught me a lot during these past three years. I still have moments of worrying, but this is less frequently now. I don’t have a 5 year plan and I definitely do not have everything figured out at the moment. But I am learning to trust that God has a plan for the future. God has a plan for every season in life that we may go through. He always has us go through specific seasons in order for us to grow or learn something through them.