Julie Furbush - Christian Science Sentinel, June 4, 2007
I didn’t realize my way of approaching my life-schedule was messed up . . . until my life-schedule got messed up.
My whole plan was to go to India to study abroad during my junior year of college. I’d jotted it down (with a permanent marker) on my mental calendar—about four years before the travel date —and fully intended to follow through with it. I admired the Indian students who passed me in class or on the subway. And I was appropriately in love with the idea of trekking through the country, seeing the colorful Hindu prayer flags, and eating naan (traditional flatbread).
When it was time to apply to go abroad to India, I was ready. I had my program picked out, application in, and felt happy. But as trips were beginning to fill up, I found my name on neither my first, second, third, nor fourth choice program locations. Bye-bye, India.
I felt stranded—mentally and emotionally torn from a dream I’d long been waiting for. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I was supposed to be heading to northern India in the spring semester of my junior year. Was this a sign? Was I not supposed to be in Asia? Was I not supposed to be going abroad at all?
Instead of calming my thinking and turning to God as I usually would, I started doubting my ability to hear the right answer for my junior year. Finally, in a fit of phone calls and fast research, I decided on my sixth choice, a program in French Africa—the island of Madagascar—and I was accepted.
The summer before my junior year, I worked as a counselor at a Christian Science camp. During this time, I prayed about my upcoming months abroad. As August came to a close, I was aware of a consistent theme that had followed me throughout the summer. It was in a line from the Bible that would come to mind often as I was on and off the ski-boat, supervising my cabin of campers, or supporting friends: "Not my will, but thine, be done" (Luke 22:42). I used this line over and over as a reminder that my personal sense of desire or need wasn’t as important as what God needed me to do or where God needed me to be. It reminded me to pray when I was in difficult situations and to trust that as long as I was following God’s plan, I was fine. I was becoming comfortable with that plan, but I still didn’t know what to say when people asked me, "Why Madagascar?"
When spring semester arrived, I packed up my three t-shirts, one fleece, one pair of pants, and other incredibly limited number of items before heading to JFK Airport for the start of the trip. I knew I was gearing up to meet 15 new friends—and I knew they would become important friends. The rare gem-like quality of these fellow students, who came from different universities, seemed so bizarre that it took me a while to realize that instead
of our friendship being unusual or out of place in the scheme of things, the exact opposite was true. It was completely natural—a part of God’s grand plan.
Having grown up with Christian Science, I understood the joy and harmony present in my group to be an example of God’s control of the universe. Mary Baker Eddy used the word harmony in her definition of Kingdom of Heaven in Science and Health: "The reign of harmony in divine Science; . . . . the atmosphere of Spirit, where Soul is supreme" (p. 590). To me this means that the kingdom of heaven is always present, and wherever I am, I can’t leave that kingdom.
One evening on my trip, I had the opportunity to prove that concept. Feeling very far from home, I was hungry, covered in dirt from that morning’s field work, and I wasn’t thrilled about an evening of endless dancing. Without TV, books, or any other sources of entertainment, dancing was a serious pastime in the little fishing village of Marobe, where we were visiting for a week. Three days into the visit, after nine hours of dancing, my student partner and I had realized we were training for a village-wide dance competition. No wonder the strict regimen.
After our usual dance session, we were sitting in our host dad’s small house, eating the beginning of our rice and bean dinner, when we heard whistles from far off. It was a village on the move, heading straight toward us. There was to be more dancing. Hot hands grabbed my arms and wrists, pushing me into position, prodding me into movement, like this, like that, over here, now there.
Then I looked up over the 50 or so dancing people, lit up by the moon, and I thought about the real reason I was there. I realized the rest of my three days in Marobe, and the rest of the study abroad, was not my time. It was bigger than that. It was their time. But beyond that, it was about living in God’s time—and appreciating and giving back to the people around me. What a relieving glimpse this was for me!
Suddenly the dancing was something different. It was a hilarious jumble of timing and exaltations. An after-dinner dance in the moonlight with not one but two African villages and their whistles. Before I knew it, the dancing was over and the neighboring village was hopping away down the dirt road.
This glimpse helped me cut out the petty part of being outside my comfort zone. For the rest of the trip, and especially when things got tough or discouraging, I knew that everything was in God’s hands. I didn’t have to limit myself by imagining that my made-up schedule was grander and more permanent than God’s. By choosing instead to see how I could be giving my time to other people, and recognizing my time as really being God’s time, I was choosing joy and peace.
On the plane back home, I kept thinking how close I had come to not going to Madagascar. Now it was absolutely clear to me that the past months had not involved my will in action, but God’s. I’d been in the exact right place, and I couldn’t step away from it.
I’ve been back in the States for six months now, and I’ve had to work through a lot of details in my life. Parts of getting back into college life weren’t fun, and the challenges that came up were hard to work through; but understanding more about God’s dominion and the permanent presence of harmony has helped me along the way. Though I still doodle my dreams in pencil into that mental plan-book, I’ve been watching myself learn more and more about God’s time, and feel comforted to know that no matter what, no matter where, I am in my right place. God’s place. |CSS
Julie Furbush is a junior at Tufts University. She plays on the Ultimate Frisbee team and is an avid photographer.
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