Well worth the wait...

So while a lot of people were looking for (and finding) jobs or applying to schools or service programs, I kept coming up empty with prospects. Part of it was not knowing exactly what I wanted to do and part of it was the field I was trying to enter into. There aren't a whole lot of jobs for a biomedical engineer wanting to use his skills to make more globally appropriate medical equipment. There isn't a whole lot of money in it. The first two jobs that seemed promising after interviews ended up not having funding to hire anyone (after leaving me waiting around for 4 months...). Then, I kept getting told I didn't have enough experience to really do any meaningful work. So after lots of frustration and lessons in patience, I kept sending emails and applying to jobs. Then it happened... in the most unpredictable of ways:

First, I was sitting in Arches National Park and I got an email from the summer program i went on last year with a job opening they had been notified of. In order to apply I just needed to send a cover letter and resume to the director of the organization within a week and a half. Easy enough, right? I spent some time fixing up my cover letter (thanks, Jon for reading that over...) and resume and then was getting ready to put it all together to send in. My computer died just before we left for yellowstone. Oh well, I'll just send it the next time we get internet... about 10 days later we got to Nashville and I opened up my computer for the first time since Arches. Up popped my resume. Uh oh. I sent it in on the last day I could. Then I realized I had been the idiot that left the job title for his last application on the cover letter... oops. So i sent another email with 'an updated' resume and cover letter. About a week later I got an email asking to schedule a 15 minute skype interview with them. So when I got to Houston and was at Allie's house, I sat down in the morning to do the interview. They called my skype and their video popped up. Oops... I don't have a camera on my computer. Then my microphone wouldn't work. Then my internet went out. So a 15 minute skype interview turned into a 10 minute phone interview. I thought it went awful. They said they'd let me know in a week. Two weeks later i got an email saying they wanted to fly me to Houston for an in person interview. It went really well. The job sounded amazing and they seemed to really like me. The next day they offered me a job. The day after that, I accepted. So after all of my planning and preparing for months and months and months, God showed me how unprepared I am to be in control.

So... in about a week I'm moving to Houston to work at Rice University. They have an organization called Beyond Traditional Borders (beyondtraditionalborders.rice.edu) that facilitates the design, development, and dissemination of medical devices designed with the constraints of the developing world in mind. For anyone who is interested, they just finished the design of a $240 microscope that runs on AA batteries that diagnoses TB as well as comparable $40,000 options.... http://bit.ly/969w1r

So I'll be doing all sorts of things for them... coordinating speakers and programs, mentoring undergraduates on their senior design projects, helping develop and produce these devices, and helping to coordinate trips to the developing world to test the inventions. I'm really pumped. And if you know anyone in Houston, please let me know... cause I'm going in pretty blind.

Here's what I learned through all of this though. How to wait on God. "Lead me in your truth, and teach me; for you are the God of my salvation; on you do I wait all the day." Psalm 25:5

Throughout the whole process I was always thinking... I just need to be patient. I'll trust God and wait and He'll provide. While we need to do this, that's not what waiting on God means. Sophomore year Seth and I were leading a D Group and Seth said something awesome: "Be patient and trust God and pray to Him as if He'll do all the work, and work as hard as you can as if He'll do none of it". This is what waiting on the Lord is. It's not waiting like we wait to hear about a job offer, hopeless and unable to do anything, it's waiting like a waiter waits on us at a restaurant. We need to serve Him as we hope and are expectant... because He will come through. And its not coming through as we expect him to give us what we want... we arent 'more fortunate than others' because we have money and went to vanderbilt and have food, etc. We're more fortunate because we get to wait on the Lord and serve the only one worth serving.

I hope this is all coherent... come visit me in Houston whenever you want though...

Garrett