I am a planner and this is an understatement. Before I go to sleep at night, I lay in bed planning what I’m going to wear the next day. My calendar has stuff on it for a year from now. If I didn’t have google calendar on my iphone- i don’t even know how I would function. When I was 6 I remember I had planned the rest of my life. I was going to be a stay at home mom, get married at 21, have kids at 24, live in a big house with a white picket fence and a porch swing and live happily ever after. Even as I write this, I’m thinking about what I should eat for lunch! Besides planning ahead and in the future, I also plan the back up plan. You have to plan for the small chance that your plans don’t work right? I always carry around with me a toothbrush, toothpaste, glasses, contact solution and a clean pair of underwear because you never when you might get stuck somewhere where i would need to spend the night and those are the necessities I would need. Or when I go on vacation I plan not just one outfit a day but 3 outfits a day because you never know what might happen and I always double up on the amount of underwear I bring. I don’t know why but I just realized I seem fixated on having clean underwear around me at all times! Whenever I plan something I try to think of all possible situations that might come up and plan accordingly. Yes I Angela Nadine Zirk am addicted to planning and it’s a problem. I’m not saying that planning isn’t a good thing and in many ways, I wouldn’t be able to function in my job and the rest of my life but it is a problem when it starts to interfere with me being able to live a life in the present and to enjoy what is happening now or when I start to take what is happening now for granted and this realization has always been a lingering thought here and there throughout the years but recent happenings have brought to light even more the importance of living the life I know and have control of and that is the present.

A friend of mine a couple months ago called me to let me know her dad had gotten into an accident and had broken his spinal cord and it was a high chance of him being paralyzed. A week after that he constricted pneumonia and the doctors weren’t even sure if he would make it. He is now doing a little better but he is paralyzed from the shoulder down and can’t speak or eat on his own. He couldn’t and wouldn’t have planned for this. My friend hadn’t planned on this… in fact we had planned a trip to costa rica but because of what happened we went and visited him instead. If he had known this was going to happen, I wonder if he would have done anything differently in the moments leading up to it? In the midst of all the horror and tragedy of what happened and trying to plan for the future, was my friend able to enjoy that 30 seconds that her dad opened his eyes at her and recognized her and sit with that moment that she was given or was her mind set on the future? I hope that she was able to.

My brother and sister in law recently told me they were pregnant. This was not planned and wasn’t suppose to happen for awhile. The joy of being pregnant and knowing they could get pregnant when so many people have trouble with getting pregnant was lost in the shadow of their plans for their life. They are now super  excited about the baby but it took some time and a myriad of feelings that took place over the changes that it will make to their plans. As much as they are happy about the baby are they still caught up now in a back up plan? Have they been able to just sit and enjoy the fact that they going to be parents without seeing their future for the next 20+ years as parents and the terror that might bring to them? I hope they have been.

I found out 4 years ago that I have a Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome… short definition is that I have cysts instead of eggs and I don’t ovulate consistently which means my chances of having kids can be slim to none. As soon as I found out, my doctor started talking to me about preserving the eggs that I do have, what the future will hold when I do decide to have children and what my options are, etc. I remember coming home and thinking…”Alright, didn’t expect this, but I need to plan for it now and what that will look like in the future.” By doing this and being set on my modification plan, did that hinder and affect the choices I made in the relationships that I had? Was I not able to fully enjoy the relationships that I had been in?

When we plan for the future and we try to predict the future, we are easily setting ourselves up for failure. We can’t control certain things and the future is one of them. When we exert our energy into trying to control something that is not controllable it leaves us exhausted, frustrated, angry, sad and we begin to lose hope. Hope that things will work out and hope that things can change. From a Christian perspective, we lose hope that God is in control and at work. When that happens, our relationship with God changes and we feel even more lost and helpless. When we exert all this energy into something like the future, we don’t have energy to enjoy the present… one thing we can control.

It’s easier to see that this is something we should do, it’s another thing to do it and to live by it. Sometimes it takes life changing events to happen in our lives to put things in perspective or to see other friends go through things that make our lives not seem so bad. We strive for the big things that we think will give us happiness, we forget the little joys in life that happen everyday. Even today as I was thinking about how sore I am from working out, I thought about my friend’s dad who can’t even walk much less exercise and I stopped for a moment to appreciate the fact that I still have the ability to work out.

Like the quote that started off this blog, today is a gift that we have been given. The question is- do we see it as that and further- do we accept, appreciate and enjoy our gift?

In college, I still felt the same. All my friends were white…very white. Even the boy I seriously dated was white (100% swedish). Looking back, I wonder what his family thought about him dating someone who wasn’t white much less swedish. His whole family and extended family was swedish and very white. But I know they all loved me for who I was but still you wonder… It wasn’t something though that I thought about at the time. It was towards the end of my college years that I started to notice the change. It occured in my interactions outside of my college.

Once I started to leave my college campus and explore chicago my junior year, is when I started to feel the differece.  It’s where I got a taste of how people saw me. Their first impression… “she’s asian.”  DOH! right?  But it’s not how I had been classified growing up. I was just another person in our small town. I was never picked on, made fun of, or felt different than my peers (who were all white). But here, I had numerous instances of being approached by asians (Korean, I’m guessing though I can’t tell the difference) who would start talking to me in Korean and I would have to tell them I didn’t understand. Which then resulted in them asking if I was Korean and I would say “yes, but I’m adopted.” To which they would all go “oh” and smile and then awkward silence followed. But then I would go to a Korean restraurant and they would ask me if I was Chinese. Asians can pick out different asian cultures pretty well but when it comes to me, I guess I don’t fit the norm of an “asian culture look.” I remember meeting with my pastor 6 months after my first day at NC3. One of the first things he asked me was what culture will I teach my kids. I was like … “huh?.” I never thought about it, but it seemed like I should just teach them what I grew up with and considered my culture which was my parents. But he said it should be something I think about. That started my first thinking “who am I.” and “what am I suppose to do with who I am?” I didn’t have any asian friends til I came to this church. It was something that is and still sometimes can be weird for me…to be in an all asian group. Our church offerred an asian american leadership class and a class for caucasion people only. I remember talking to the teacher of the white one. She said that I could be in it if I wanted to since culturally I was that… but that some people in the class would view it as a little weird. But then another person said I couldn’t be in it because I wasn’t white; that I needed to go to the asian one. Except with the asian one, I dont’ have any “asian” culture in me except my looks. It was that instance that first got me really frustrated about being adopted and how I really don’t fit in a group or if I do fit in a group that other people don’t think I belong in that group.

I am currently in a relationship with an asian guy. I never thought that would happen since every guy I’ve dated before has been white but I guess God had different plans in mind for me. Well, my background has become even more prevalent in this relationship. I feel like I’m interracially dating my own race!!!  It’s so weird. But things like language barrier with his parents has come up as a concern on both sides. Also just little things you could never think of has come up and made us realize that we have to be super good at communicating else things get mis-interpreted because of our cultural backgrounds. It got me thinking a little while ago that if I happen to marry an asian guy one day and have kids, how will they grow up? Will they be taught korean so they can converse with their grandparents and I’ll be left to wonder what is being said between them? Will they be confused by their parents- “parenting techniques” as we raise them up bi-culturally most likely? It’s something I wont know til it happens.

As more kids are being adopted from other countries and more interracial marriages resulting in more mixed children- culture/race isn’t so black and white. Children wont fit so nicely in a category. There will be asian-indian, black-asian, black-indian, white-black, white-asian, asian-native american, black-native american children and so on. Even some who will be a mixture of 3 or more races. How will these children grow up? Who will they identify with? Will they go thru some major indentity crisis? I think of adopted children who go thru identity crisis and I wonder if it will become even a bigger crisis as more races are intertwined and fused together. How will diversity look in the next 20, 40, 50 years?