Normally I’m a very “go-with-the-flow” type of person. I have a type B personality, and this has often been seen as a weakness in my life, especially during my time at University. My school was overwhelmingly magnetic for type A personas. This made life difficult while I was there. I felt like less of a person because of my lack of motivation and focus. It was also difficult because type A people have a tendency to dislike type B’s because we appear apathetic and at times worthless. Almost all of my professors and classmates were unbearably ambitious, competitive and controlling. This very generalized perception is surprisingly accurate. If you were there, you would agree. Trust me.
So amidst all of these people who would be categorized as type A (and knew it, and were proud of that fact), I was different. Deadlines meant something to me, but not nearly as much as it did to everyone else. And keeping a close eye on my GPA to ensure that it was higher than everyone else’s was just about the last thing on my non-existent to-do list. It got to the point where my professors decided I have ADD and that was why I was different from everyone else. They couldn’t accept that I just had a different core personality. However, being surrounded by type A behavior, I slowly realized that I was far less neurotic than I thought. I saw that everyone was crazy in his own way. And I began to embrace my relaxed and seemingly disengaged natural affect. Once I embraced it I saw all the benefits.
The most obvious way that I saw my different personality work for good was when it came to going on mission trips. While the leader and everyone else were freaking out about every little detail, I was able to take on each challenge with patience. I’m not saying that everyone should be like that for a mission trip, because very little would have gotten done if we didn’t have the Susie Walters of the world to make things happen. But it worked well when everyone else was like that, for me to be a calm and collected force.
Mission trips have a very consistent tendency to change…constantly. We joke that the one thing you can be sure of in missions is that you can’t be sure of anything. There are a million things to be thinking about and most of them are full of worry. But I very rarely worried about these trips.
When I led the first winter break trip, we had no precedent to go from, but I decided that I knew I was going, and if other people signed up, awesome! I put the whole trip in God’s hands, and rolled with it. When I got phone calls the night before that two of the people signed up weren’t coming, I prayed that both of them would meet God where they were and for Him to work just as much in and through them as He would in everyone still going. It ended up being a life-changing trip for most (if not all) of the fourteen or so volunteers we had. It was a good size group and everything worked out. Also, it was the least expensive trip our ministry ever offered! (Okay, enough bragging Samantha.) But it felt good. I looked at what I put together and saw God working in so many ways. And that’s when I realized something. It wasn’t me or my personality that made the trip less stressful and allowed it to work out without anyone going crazy over every little thing, it was the fact that I gave it up to God. And that’s why all our trips worked out so great, because the leader always placed the entire trip in God’s hands.
That is the gift of my type B personality. I can more easily give God the control. I trust Him so entirely, and see that there is nothing I can do to improve what He’s doing except to follow His lead. This comforts me because it helps to see how God has crafted me specifically for His call on my life to missions. I cannot achieve this level of trust however if I’m not in constant prayer. When I skip my quiet time in the morning, I notice. My day becomes less intentional. I thrive on spontaneity, but I also firmly believe that we should be present and intentional in everything we do in this life. So when I decided less than a week before it started, to up and move to Mexico for five months and do a discipleship training school, it was spontaneous and outwardly random. However, I knew it was what God wanted me to do, so was in fact not random at all. We just have a tendency not to understand where God’s plan is going and thus are surprised when it takes us somewhere we never imagined.
Currently I have quite literally no external structure to my life. I’ve loved living like that because it comes naturally for me. However, I’m starting to get frustrated with myself for not being more productive. So I’ve gotten to the point where I have to review what all my type A friends in college taught me, and bring some organization and urgency into my life. I’ve started a more consistent weekly schedule by creating certain events around which to plan, since I don’t have classes or a job to do that for me. I found that planning my life around television shows worked, but then I decided I didn’t need to be watching the television shows and thus lost my dependable timetable of reference. So I am creating a new one. I’ve been going over to my cousin’s house each week to help her out with her kids. This has been doubly awesome because I get so spend more time with that part of my family, and it leaves them a little less stressed, plus there’s a baby! Also, my friend and I want to start a small group Bible study. I’m pretty pumped for this and so once we decide when to have it that will be factored into my vast amount of current free time. I’ve also decided that exercising whenever I feel like it could be turned into a more regular occurrence, along with showering. These things seem so fickle, but they’re all I’ve got. The rest of my time is filled with studying, reading, hanging out with friends, writing, and sewing. I also have been dabbling a little more into practicing my guitar and decided I want to paint more. These are things I want to do all the time, but haven’t had the time for in the past. Now, I have all the time in the world (well, what’s left after studying)!
To try and start off with this better, more productive lifestyle, I have created a to-do list for tomorrow. It’s sad, but I even had to put a wake-up time on the list, because I haven’t had to wake myself up at any particular time for weeks now, and I need to bring that back. I never thought I would voluntarily do that. So here’s to self-improvement, productivity and faking it as a type A!
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