why peace corps (instead of something else)

I got my staging information in an email this week – I leave for Peace Corps stuff a month from today. What. The. Heck. This can’t be real… can it?

A question I’ve heard from a variety of people has been “Why the Peace Corps? And as a Christian, why that instead of missions?” So I wanted to write a post explaining why for those that are curious and to also put to words things that have been jumbling around in my head like miscellaneous loose change for months now.

5 things i wish i had known about job searching

The title of this post is mostly self-explanatory, but here’s the gist in a longer version. I am 23 years old, a part-time employee at a local coffee shop, living back at my parent’s house(s), and with a lot of free time on my hands. So, when you get only have a little 4 hour shift that ends before 10 am and the rest of the whole day looms in front of you, calendar empty, what do you do? Well, personally I’ve found that I’m either going to fill it by watching episodes of How I Met Your Mother on Netflix or trying to go for a run or rearranging my room (yet again), and spending hour upon hour searching the internet for some company somewhere that might hire me. Or staring at a cover letter and resume that I have tweaked so many times I’ve got the versions saved as resume_1.doc through resume_28.doc in my “job search” file on my computer. I have my personal business card ordered (though I still am not sure exactly why I need one when I don’t have a big kid job) and have spent an embarrassing amount of time making sure my Linkedin.com profile is 100% complete. (You can check it out at www.linkedin.com/in/aemason, I’m pretty proud of it).

This whole thing feels like a rabbit trail. And with inspirational quotes on “calling” blowing up sites like Pinterest like a hailstorm, it makes me want to tear my hair out. Our world now equates who we are with what we do. It used to be the other way around, but now we crave jobs that are exciting and developing and sound cool to people – we want work places that encourage “Bring Your Dog To Work Day” everyday and who go on company-sponsored mountain biking adventures during lunchtime (Remember I live in Boulder, CO, so that really is a normal thing around here) and send you on all-expenses paid work trips overseas every other week. The difference between a “job” and a “career” can’t just be passion or what you want to do. And the only jobs out there worth doing can’t just be ones that we love. Calling everything else settling isn’t realistic. Because not all jobs are supposed to be like that, and that has to be okay. Yes, we can yearn for those jobs, but sometimes a job needs to just be a job and our passion, our love, our excitement, is what we do when we come home after work – to a family, to volunteer somewhere, the mountains we play in on the weekends, something, anything.