I feel slightly discouraged lately.. Maybe it is the job hunt that is bringing me down. Another year in a job that I don’t want to do is my greatest fear.  But how do I get out of this negative cycle of working for jobs that I have absolutely no interest for… I know what I want. I just don’t know how to get there. From A to B.  Then doing a course costs money also, and I need a sponsor…. if someone would love to sponsor me to do a Masters in Counselling and Psychotherapy then please let me know… Well that was a joke. But I am somewhat serious too!

Life is a series of trials… but then I don’t think I have been all that discouraged either.  I enjoyed my time in Belfast over the weekend, when I shared my testimony to many different women, with their own baggage. It was a privilege to be able to share my story with them, and give them encouragement to point their eyes towards God, to ask God for help…. To keep persevering even when the going gets tough.  The thing is I love helping people, I love interacting with people, if I know that I am making a difference, a positive difference, a change for the better..   Sometimes it is just about being there for someone rather than just thinking about ourselves…. That is what most people do these days….

But the job plagues me, keeps me awake at night and I wonder how it will pan out. Will it turn out like another Berlin mistake? It haunts me at night.  Berlin wasn’t really a mistake, it was just one of those things that didn’t really work out, but I did get to meet some lovely people.  I am just wondering what God wants me to do? Does He really want me to be in Ireland? Or is that just my imagination? I want a job…. a good job for a change… not a lousy job. But how do I get that? When even starting the job hunt daunts me, overwhelms me, depresses me, and makes me feel like I am already losing a battle, and haven’t really made headway with this…. Oh how I wish I knew what God wanted me to do.

Or.. how I wish I could fast forward to when this trial of being twenty-something is over. When I have my life together. The dreams, the desires of wanting to be married, and have a family of my own, the desire to want to become a specialist grief counsellor, the desire to become a full-time writer, seem all out of reach, and yet they seem closer… and I can hear the word patience being whispered into my heart.  Why is being patient sometimes so hard? Why is this side of twenty sometimes so hard…. I used to have it all planned out in my head.

Be married by twenty-one.
Have at least one or two children by twenty-five.
Be relaxed, and happy.
Do responsible adult things.

Except it has not panned out that way.
Trial after trial.
Fear after fear.
Child loss. I never thought I’d lose three children
By the time I reached the ripe old age of twenty-four.

Book published.
Talking to people about the grief process.
Going from lousy job to the next lousy job.
Trying to figure out how to pay for a course
That seems so far out of reach.
Patience.
Help me Lord please.

And so I am struggling today, and wondering when the struggle, the conundrum of my life will end, and things will be relatively easy? Does anyone know? Do the trials ever stop?  Or will they go on and on and on? Who am I? What am I supposed to do? Is it somehow crazy, that I believe I am supposed to be here in Ireland, and yet so far I feel like nothing is going the way I imagined it would. Patience. Wait Hannah. Patience. And so I wait, and so I try to have patience.

Help me Lord, please. I can’t do this on my own anymore.  How much longer I wonder? I want a way out, an easy solution to being in my late twenty’s rather than struggling, and trying to figure out the ins and outs of a future unknown to me, except for this one vision – that has plagued me for the last ten years..  To help the brokenhearted in particular the women who have been hurt, who have lost children, who have been abused. That is my hope. That is what I cling onto.