living without

The past few weeks I've been quick with YouTube videos and slow with using real words on this blog. It's mostly out of selfish lack of motivation. I haven't had the best last few weeks and was in (still coming out of?) a terrible state of self-pity.

I turned 22. Lovely. Really though, I love birthdays.

However, I always knew that I would turn 22 in the January of my senior year, and for me that marked a very important deadline. Since I was a junior in high school and figured out the current age and month and time of my life -- 22, January, Senior -- I had made a vow that I would be securely employed by now.

"My 22nd birthday is the perfect deadline.. the start of a new year, the middle of a school year, with a few more months of college left.. the perfect deadline for being employed with a 'real person job." 

-my thoughts over the past few years. 

But here I am, two and a half weeks into my 22nd year -- not only without a job -- but without any prospects. My industry, journalism and media, was one of the ones hit the hardest in the economic downturn that came about my sophomore year of college. But still, I was hopeful. But still, I was naive. I've been lucky, with adequate effort, I've been able to get everything I wanted in my life so far. But now, I'm fighting hundreds of applicants for one 30K (if I'm lucky) reporting job.

To add insult to serious injury (name that Hugh Grant movie), two days after turning 22, my car broke down. permanently.

I've been set all my life, yet on the cusp of entering reality, I find myself jobless and unpredictably car-less.

blerg.

So, you see, the past few weeks I've been thinking in terms of 'me.' 'I'm' living without. Poor 'me.'

me, me, me. I, I, I.

Then, all the way across the world, something happened in Cairo, Egypt. In political frenzy, the dear citizens of that nation turned against each other. Against their neighbors and childhood friends and brothers.

Violence spread like wildfire and within a day the entire world became painstakingly aware of the sadness that has overcome this most infamous nation. However, the causes of these violent acts and revolutionary mindsets are not what I'm here to preach.

While watching redundant footage of the Egyptian men clubbing each other and hurling fire across the streets of Trafalgar Square in Cairo, all I could think about were the people they left behind. Their wives, jumping at every noise as they anxiously wait for husbands to return, alive, for the night. Their mothers, undoubtedly worrying themselves sick as they watch the same coverage that I, 3,000 miles away, am watching. The sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, who spend the day in their bedrooms praying for their fathers and brothers to just be safe.

They are a people group in suffering. I, I soon realized, -in my warm apartment, my family safe and intact a short drive away, nearing the end of an amazing education, my friends not out sacrificing their lives for a cause but doing homework beside me - I am not suffering. Not even close.

So what. I don't have a job yet. But I will at some point. I don't have a car for the next few months. But my roommates do, and are happy to chauffeur me to and from the grocery store.

I'm not living without. I'm living with one of the best circumstances that exist on this earth.

If I were telling this over dinner, I would ask that you bow your head and we would pray for Egypt. Then I would raise my glass, and you would follow suit.

I would say 

'Here's to our blessed lives, here's to the safety of our loved ones, here's to remembering that life is about more than jobs and cars, here's to possibility and here's to hoping that one day we'll all get it right.'

Glasses would clink, we'd take a sip, and remember that in this life, we are never without.