"What are your plans for after the summer?"

To adults, I must seem very bad at answering this question. I usually smile cheerfully and say that I'm waiting to hear back from a fellowship and if I don't get it, I'll live at home and pursue full-time options in NYC or move to Florida and work for my grandmother.
The polite adult asks me what I majored in --
"communication studies" --> polite smile --> me explaining my major --> polite smile
Then when I tell people I want to work in nonprofit, I either have to explain it a lot or I get treated as some sort of social hero. Both confuse me.

The awkward thing is, I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. I don't really think anyone does. People can't usually fit into job titles -- that would be too one-dimensional. But I don't think I'm even going to come close to having some sort of helpful label like "counselor" or "consultant" to give in carefully parceled-out answers to well-meaning parents and dental hygienists. That's very much okay with me. It just means I have to have longer conversations.

Here's the thing. I don't know WHAT I want to be, but I know WHO I want to be: the kind of woman that prays about everything, who brings dinner to her sick friend, who turns up the radio and sings in yucky traffic, who hosts a book group in her living room for high school girls, who generously donates toward or volunteers for things she cares about.

I know WHO I am right now, and allow that to influence looking for a job. I was created to articulate things that other people don't usually say, to invite and welcome in outsiders, to rally groups together, to take an abstract project and put it into a list, to initiate, to revive, to make things happen, to work where I can directly connect with people and meet their needs, instead of indirectly.

I don't know WHAT I want to be, but I know WHERE I want to be: an inexplicable pull tugs me across the Hudson River and back home to New York. It's not romantic or literary at all. It just is where I belong.

And I know the WHEN is "after the summer" and I know the WHY is "for the glory of God and the furthering of his kingdom." So I'm set. I am not worried about the WHAT. It's less important than the WHO.* I'm pretty sure that as I depend on God to redeem me and make me who he needs me to be, and focus on that, the WHAT will just always be the means of getting there.

Maybe that should be my answer.

*The Who is also coincidentally very important
*Music joke