What am I doing here?

Last summer I had a midlife crisis while working my summer job. I realized that I only had two summers of student-freedom left in my life and I was already spending one of them painting. Not painting for pleasure like an artist, painting for cash. I hated my job and started dreaming those you-only-live-once dreams. I looked at my bucket list and realized that if I were ever to fulfill my lifelong dream of going to Japan it would have to be next year. After that I would start grad school year-round and then jump into my career.

So I quit my job and started taking intensive Japanese language courses to finish off that summer. We covered one year's worth of Japanese in 6 weeks. Then when the fall came I added regular Japanese courses to my super-senior year at BYU. I began to prepare for either a study abroad or an internship. Originally I was hoping to find a way to combine my mental health/family counseling studies with this experience in Japan by interning for a counseling center or something but I quickly found out that I wouldn't be prepared for that level of Japanese-speaking and working in the mental health field across boundaries is difficult at best, unethical and reckless at worst.

I had a hard time deciding if I should really spend the summer in Japan, and actually I applied for a different internship with locations in Provo and Seattle and decided that if I got that internship it would be a better career move and my ambitions for world travel would have to rest. Fortunately I got rejected and was left with my backup plan of fulfilling dreams.

Once I decided to come to Japan I had to figure out how to pull it off. I was having no luck finding internship opportunities on my own so I was left with either a study abroad or an English-teaching internship through BYU. The study abroad offered wider travel but I was drawn to teaching English for several reasons. It was cheaper, it lasted longer, I would get to live with a host family (instead of in hotels), I would be able to interact with the people and I could practice teaching which I'm interested in pursuing part-time at some point in my career.

When the tsunami hit there were a couple weeks where we weren't sure if we would have to cancel the internship program or not. BYU ended up canceling the study abroad but not the internship program. I guess they saw us a contributing producers of a good (teaching English) but the study abroad students were consumers and would place an unnecessary burden on Japan's strained resources as they continue to recover from the tsunami. I guess I made the right choice.

Well, maybe it's more accurate to say I was guided. There were so many times when I thought my plans of Japan would be derailed, but I can see many tender mercies from the Lord as He has helped me fulfill this silly dream of mine. I don't know why He decided to help me out. I can envision Him saying “in an eternal perspective, Taylor, going to Japan really won't advance your progression. Just give up this dream and get to work on less useless things.” But He didn't. He's decided to advocate my dreams. He's saying, “if it's important to you then it's important to me.”