Second Chances

This year is flashing by at an unbelievable speed. Some years of my life have soared by lazily like a seagull; some have passed with a determined, steady pace like a hawk; but this year is darting by like a hummingbird, nearly too fast for the human eye to see.
This year, in some senses, is a marker that I will look back on in years to come. I will remember it as the year I chose to give up the dream that I thought God had called me to. The year I struggled with God's plan and purpose for me. The year that, perhaps most significantly, I chose to heed God's call to a place I thought I would never go again, to confront my hidden insecurities, and hopefully the year that I was able to surrender all of it to Him and set my face towards my fear.
You see, God has called me to return to the school that I left in haste and in tears. The same school where I struggled with who I was when my initial plans crashed down around my ears. The same school where I first confronted deep depression, suicidal thoughts, and many other intense enemies - yet it is a place of God's light and grace. For the time I have spent away from it, though, I have looked at this place which for me once shone with God's presence, and I have seen only darkness, despair, and fear. When the thought crept into my mind that maybe, just maybe, I should return, I laughed in its face. How could I ever go back and subject myself to that again?
This was compounded by the fact that I thought I had found God's plan for me. I had a dream career that was lining up nicely, and I was settling into the comfort I always find in thinking I know what the next chapter of my life holds. How could I give it up to return to the darkness that still haunts me like a specter, with no guarantee that my life would ever turn this direction again?
But God, in His wisdom, set me on this path for a while and then beckoned me to take a fork that leads back to the valley I left behind. It is not because I missed the point the first time. It is not because I forgot to do something or need to undo a wrong I committed. This, rather, is a fresh start. A second chance at beginning, yet with all the wisdom of my time away to guide me.
Jonah, too, heard God's plan and must have laughed in disbelief. He had a comfortable life with a determined future in a field of ministry that God had obviously called him to. Yet God chose him to strike out on a path he had no desire to tread, and he ran from it. God had every right to scrap the whole idea, allow Jonah to suffer the full consequences of his disobedience, and start afresh with a prophet who would be more receptive to the thought. Instead, He held Jonah with an unfaltering hand to the course that He had set, and used him to deliver the message that saved an entire city.
Jonah was given a second chance. He had more to learn from this journey to Nineveh.God wasn't done with him yet; he had a story to complete that was beyond Jonah's comprehension - a story that touches lives even today.
I, too, have a second chance. I have more to learn. I have more to do. For whatever reason, God is not done with me at this school, and that means He will hold me to the course that He has set with a hand just as unfaltering as the one that held Jonah. I am thankful that His hand does not grip my wrist and drag me along, as an irritated parent might drag a wayward child. Instead, His hands hold me close to His heart, like a shepherd comforting a lamb that had been lost. He does not bring me to this place again for a second dose of the pain that happened my first time through; He brings me here to heal me of it.
I am not the person I was then. I will not face the same struggles that she faced. I will not make the same mistakes that she made. Hopefully, the only similarity is that I will cling to my Father as hard as she did; that I will trust in His plan as desperately as she did; and that I will find as much peace in His embrace as she did.
What about you? Is there something you've given up on that still sits quietly in the back of your mind? Is there a fear that still haunts your steps that God wants you to face head-on? Where is your Nineveh? And what would a second chance look like - a grace-filled, beautiful, unexpected second chance?