The Steadfast Heart

Have you ever asked yourself the question, “What am I doing with my life?” After a season of doing life a certain way, have you ever been stopped by a pressing feeling that your life is calling for a change? Whether you’re aware of what that change might be or what it may mean for you, you can’t deny those small stirrings. Those small stirrings are what lead to the bigger questions. Those questions eventually find their answers and those answers are what produce the change. 

Eighteen months ago, the small stirrings in my heart were to take my career in a different direction. After seven years of life in the cosmetology industry, my dreams were halted by state licensure regulations. To transfer your license to the state of Wisconsin, you must have 1,800 hours of cosmetology school under your belt or five years of experience behind the chair. Most states, including Illinois where I completed my education only require 1,500 hours, which is what I had completed, combined with only six months of behind the chair experience. 

Hunter had been commuting an hour one way to his college campus in order to complete his final year of college during our first six months of marriage while I worked at the salon. For me to go back to cosmetology school for three months would have eliminated our income as well as the fact that we only had five weeks of turnaround time from when Hunter accepted the teaching position in Wisconsin, to when we moved across the state line. 

But I truly believe that God was working out His bigger plan for me in the months prior to our move that exceeded my small ambitions. In 2015, I completed the twelve-month cosmetology program in just over eight months, all while planning a wedding and working at the salon in my spare time. When I finally got behind the chair, I was exhausted.  The amount of pressure I had placed on myself to make a living, to be an all-star newlywed wife, and to have my adulthood all together at twenty-two was crushing. 

I begged our salon management to allow me to take on three different roles in order to make rent and pay for gas, all while living for my giant dream of being a knockout hair stylist. But in the process, I lowered the quality of life for me and my new husband. I came home multiple nights after 8:30, missing the time to make dinner (not that I was good at it or even enjoyed botching yet another Pinterest recipe) or to have enough focus to hear about his day.  I was failing at the things I thought a wife was supposed to be able to execute flawlessly. As a result, I lived my life out of an intense stress and after months into this new routine, my soul began to crave something different.

The most excruciating part about walking away from life at the salon was the reality that my plans had failed. I feared I was using this move as a cop-out. I feared that when the rubber hit the road, I really didn’t have what it took to do hair. I spent years watching some of the best people in the business own their craft and I was tapping out after six short months. Sometimes I replied to the shocked question of, “You’re not going to do hair anymore?! You just finished all of that schooling!” with a prideful story about how I was burnt out (which was true) and how I thought a life in business was a better choice anyway.

I went from defending my decision to choose a life in cosmetology to practically disowning it. I tried winning back the respect all of the people I lost when I didn’t go into business after college.  The truth was, for the first time in my life, I was forced to build my identity around something other than a career. And as the music faded on my dreams and I began questioning my decisions and the God that allowed me to dream really big dreams, I realized that my plans weren’t bullet proof. My plans had just failed. 

And in the weeks leading up to our move, my plans continued to fail. I applied to thirty-one places in Wisconsin, some even as far as an hour commute out of absolute desperation. I tried submitting multiple resumes, job sites, and career paths. I applied for sales positions, secretary postings, and reached out to companies in fields I had never even heard of. I spent weeks grasping at straws and most times, I never received so much as a rejection letter. Just silence. 

I was sitting in a puddle of my own questions and doubts. Was it a mistake to go into hair after college? Was is a mistake not to network my way into a life in business in my hometown? If I would have gone into administration or management like the piece of paper I have framed says, would I have gotten a job quicker in Wisconsin? Why am I so ready to hang up my apron and move on from hair after I dreamed of this for so long? 

The pressure to land a job only increased after realizing upon moving in June, our rent would literally double, we would now be in charge of paying for our own insurance, cell phone plan, and all things adult-like our parents had waived while we were only living on my income, and the minor detail that Hunter’s first paycheck wouldn’t be wired into our checking account until after school started in September. This was just the tiny price we were going to have to pay for wanting to have time to get acclimated in our new town a few months before the school year began.

Days before we were to be packing up the Uhaul, I was at the salon after close packing up my bag of tools after another shift, when my phone buzzed a couple of times.  Chick-fil-A had just opened up a few months prior in our city and the Owner/Operator had quickly become a treasured favorite in our family.  I remember reading her text, crying, and then driving home trying to process what this might mean.

She told me that her former co-worker at Chick-fil-A when she worked in Raleigh was now an Operator in Wisconsin. I’d probably have a commute, but he was interested in interviewing me to come on his team once we had moved. 

“I might be a team member at Chick-fil-A,” I thought as I pictured life in a red polo and coming home smelling like poultry. The tears came from realizing that this was not a life I had ever planned, even when I was looking for jobs at sixteen. Then the tears continued to stream down my face on my drive home as I sighed in huge relief that finally, I had a lead on a job. There was hope, even if working at Chick-fil-A for a few months meant it’d buy me time to look elsewhere. 

Through thirty-one job applications, I had arrived at such a place of humility in a short amount of time. I don’t mean that in a good way. I mean that God literally had to run over my pride with a dump truck, back it up, and do it a couple more times before I arrived at Humble Village, and even then I sat at that table with my arms crossed. The reality was, I was refusing to eat the humble pie God was serving. I cried.  I played the victim.  I degraded myself and my prior career decisions that at one point in time I had believed were Jesus-led.  

But once I truly got over myself, I began to see the truth that a different story was being written for me. See, I had thought that maybe after the salon chapter in my life closed, God was just forgetting to turn the page on what was next for me.  But He wasn’t forgetting anything.  I was just reading the wrong book. 

I hope you’ll keep following His story for me in the blog posts to follow.  My hope is that you might identify somewhere between paragraphs with the truth that when your plans fall apart and my plans fail, we are being held safely in His grip–even when we may not believe it, feel it, or see it. 

Take care & take heart,

Natalie

Originally written November 2017