A New Kind Of Bucket List

There are bucket lists floating all over the daggon internets. Today I even saw one on a friend's facebook that was a to-do list by the time you turn thirty. That means I only have a few short years to complete a list of someone else's priorities and ideas of "fulfilled life." Yikes, I'd better get on that!

Ok clearly you hear the sarcasm in my voice. As a midwest minister's wife, who works with kids, loves to bake, has 2.5 dogs and hopes to be at least a half-time stay at home mom, I'm the quintessential traditional female role. Not because I felt pressure, but because it's what I really truly wanted.

That being said, I'm constantly fighting to find contentment. Everything American says to long for more, aim for bigger, higher. When I'm indulging in girliness (read: at a bar or perusing Pinterest), there are women and websites giving all the new lists on how to be more fit, what to do by the time you're 20, 25, 27, 30. When I'm indulging my home-making side, I'm barraged by the newest products, the running to-do list of projects and diy that my home should be in seemingly everyone's eyes. At work everything is about the newest method, the latest training, and how many letters you can rack up to follow your name.

The problem is, the calling of the kingdom is to contentment. It is to sacrificial love, to making future plans only based on your current calling, to prioritizing others over what you would like to do, and others' needs and desires over your own.

But that doesn't make it less exciting or less fulfilling. It only makes it more so.

So then, I'm going to keep a new kind of bucket list. A list of all the wonderful and ridiculous things the Good Lord has allowed me to experience before I kick the bucket. A list of what He has brought me to, not a list of where I will go. Because where I will go is unknown and that is exciting and wonderful, because the One who holds my future is perfect and exciting and magnificent, and so my life with Him will be those things also if I am obedient to His calling.

So here it is so far....


My Bucket List:

Fall madly in love.
Completely relocate to a new place almost completely on my own.
Completely relocate to a new place to follow my husband's calling.
Change my Friday-night plans to eat dinner and drink coffee with a (probably schizophrenic) homeless women who was moments before cursing at me and the rest of traffic and the world at the top of her lungs.
Work in a scary at-risk area.
Let a homeless stranger move in with me.
Make friends with random neighbors, and piss random neighbors off by being trashy.
Learn to use gum paste.
Learn to make an icing rose.
Visit another country (3)
Visit another continent (1)
Go to a ballet
Go to an opera
Get a real black eye.
Ride a rollercoaster.
Adopt a dog (2)
Go on a mission trip (4)
Learn another language (Spanish)
Go to extensive lengths to rescue a stray (3 flea baths, 2 car rides, and bug bombing my car for one: currently on month 2 of housing another)
Commit to something totally out of my comfort zone and follow-through. (VOD choir, Zumba)
Pick up and move to another state for a strange job I have only been promised/told of.
Be a camp counselor.
Be a manager.
Learn to make espresso.
Learn to cook. Like, foreal cook.
Learn to ballroom dance.
Stay in a hospital.
Preach a full sermon.
Move in with strangers. (housemates!)
Pay someone's rent.
Get in a car wreck.
Go snorkeling in the ocean.
Hike a pyramid.
Get cussed out by a friend in a public place.
Gain weight. Lose weight.
Pray with a dying man.
Pray over a man while he died.
Seen someone healed of cancer.
Gone foreal camping. (boundary waters)
Give a recital.
Graduate college.
Heard a child's first words.
Give a testimony.
Been a waitress.
Been a nanny.
Have an P.O.Box
Helped with disaster relief.
Ride a bicycle built for two.
Balance my checkbook.