What if I didn't do this one thing?

Do you ever think younger you would be really surprised by future you? I do. If I told my 12 year old self that I was going to be a pastor and live in Wisconsin and own a real jacket and develop a slight accent and that a tornado would hit my house and I'd have a son and a husband and a dog and I could call people on a phone that could work outside of my house and I would literally be able to see people in it, I would never have believed you (I maybe wouldn't be *that* surprised that I had a husband, but I didn't want to leave Jesse out. I also don't think I'd be surprised that I'd have a jacket? I WOULD however, be surprised to find out that a zip-up sweatshirt is not actually a jacket.).

I think about all of these little and big decisions that have changed my life, and probably a million ways that I can't even know about. Here are a few that come to mind:

-Before you can be a pastor, they make you take a psychological evaluation. After my evaluation, the psychologist offered some advice/feedback. Since I was planning to go to seminary immediately after college, he suggested I take the year off and get some "life experience." I thought about it for about 12 seconds and decided that I wasn't going to take his advice and go to sem anyway. If I hadn't gone right away, I likely would have an entirely different group of people that I spent my time with, taken a different job- so no Living Waters & no Pastor Kathryn, wouldn't have met Jesse in time (he's quite a catch, I'm sure some other nice girl would have snatched him up), and so many other things because of that decision and subsequent decisions.

-Switching high schools in 9th grade. I didn't really like Westlake High, so I put myself on the waitlist at Thousand Oaks (but actually, my mom called and put me on the list). December of 2000 I started at TO. I met a bunch of different people, got to go to school with a lot of my church people, did a brave thing... and then both of my sisters went there.

-Signing up for the Pizza Luce dinner during orientation week at Luther Sem. Jesse and I both happened to sign up for the same dinner outing and that's how we met. He leaned over and saw me picking off the cheese off my pizza and said, "hey, are you going to eat that?" and then I handed him a wad of cheese. What if we didn't have that as our anecdotal "way we met" story? It would just be the actual one: our friend Heather told me that we should date.

-So many Lutheran events that I've been to and met different people and then because of meeting those different people met other people, and so on and so on. Here's one example: Jesse and I were at the Youth Ministry Extravaganza in Anaheim, and Don Marsh was there and friendly as ever. He flagged us down and said we should sit with him and the other people at his table (I had never met him before). We talked about this team that he was starting for the synod and I should be on it. I was, met a lovely group of colleagues and friends, and then got to lead the team a few years later. What if I didn't sit by him that one time?

There are about a million other examples, but I think you get the idea. Also, if you haven't seen the movie Sliding Doors, go see it. I think about that movie ALL THE TIME.   

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