Photo by Tim Green

By Jerrica Ching

I am a planner, through and through.  I love making to-do lists, I enjoy filling out planners and calendars, and ideally I plan ahead for a 3-month timeframe at the minimum.  I have embraced my Type A nature and have found that throughout college, graduate school, and now in the working world, being a planner has helped me succeed.  Although it may seem ironic and slightly humorous that a young woman who loves planning is writing about “The Unplanned Life,” I have come to realize that a lot of my life has actually gone not according to my original plan.

When I was growing up in the church, I initially felt called to remain home in Hawaii and pursue a degree in travel industry management, serving tourists who visited our beautiful paradise.  I committed six years from high school through the beginning of college to learning Japanese, and had enrolled in all of the classes I needed to complete my degree in four years.  During the end of my sophomore year in college, I visited a friend in Chicago, where it soon dawned on me that the world was a lot bigger than a tiny group of islands in the middle of the ocean.  While I have always felt that God was calling me to serve others, that trip to Chicago gave me a small glimpse that perhaps the way I was meant to serve others was not going to be in Hawaii.

Initially I was terrified of leaving home.  The very fact that I kept on hearing God gently push me and tell me, “You need to go somewhere where you are not comfortable so you can truly grow” was a thought I tried to ignore every single time. Nobody else in my family had ventured away from Hawaii aside from going on vacations.  My first blog entry for AAWOL was about being called to attend George Fox University in Portland, Oregon.  While there were other marriage and family therapy programs that I had applied to in other heavily populated Asian American areas that would’ve felt similar to the demographic I was used to seeing in Hawaii, whenever I questioned if this was the right move, I felt God nodding and reassuring me that everything would go according to His plan.

My plan had been to serve others in an environment that I was familiar with, in a place where I was confident I could be successful.  God’s plan was for me to serve others in a completely different environment than I was accustomed to, and to become an even greater success in this unfamiliar territory.  God allowed me to learn to give up a plan that I thought was meant for me, and to embrace the plan that he had for me all along.  I have not had to give up my love for calendars, but I have given up the need to make things happen the way I want them to.

Jerrica KF Ching lives in the beautiful state of Washington and works as a Mental Health Primary Care Provider serving children, adolescents, and their families at Columbia Wellness.  She graduated with an MA in Marriage, Couple, and Family Counseling from George Fox University and is working towards becoming a licensed marriage and family therapist. Her research on racial colorblindness has recently been published in The International Journal of Social Science Studies.