Why start a blog?
- Katie Bianchini
- Nov 27, 2018
- 5 min read
Hello and welcome to my first blog post!
Well, actually, once upon a time I wrote a blog about Law and Order: SVU, the greatest TV show of all time (don’t @ me), but though I love that show dearly, I’m excited to tell other stories now instead of writing episode reviews.
So why start a blog now? “Katie, don’t you like have a college degree and stuff and like should be on a career path to success or whatever?” (If you read that in a normal voice, please go back and read it like Karen from Mean Girls)
Yes, I graduated in December of 2016 with BAs in Journalism & New Media and Spanish. Then last May I completed a Master’s in Education. “So like, why aren’t you a full time teacher then?”
Strap on your seat belts…here’s the round-about answer.
In January 2017, I went on a mission trip to the Dominican Republic. Each trip to the DR with Lipscomb Track Missions impacted me profoundly, but this one left me with a recurring theme of God’s faithfulness that has echoed in my heart and mind since.
On the final day of the trip, we planned to serve dinner to a neighborhood of people in Santiago. We expected that 70-80 people would show up and prepared accordingly. At 5:30pm—30 minutes before the dinner’s start time—a significant crowd of people had already arrived at the house…and in the Caribbean, people NEVER come early to events. We knew right then we were in for a surprise.
Throughout the evening, I stood at a pot of chicken, dishing it out onto plates as other team members carried food out the door to the people. Every server who returned reported that five more people, ten more people, twenty more people had arrived. I was sure I was going to run out of chicken; I was sure we’d run out of everything!
But we didn’t.
The pots never emptied. “We’re out of plates,” one person would say as another person appeared from the kitchen with a new stack of plates. We were like magicians pulling endless scarves out of hats. Except this wasn’t magic: this was God.
Not only did we feed every person who arrived, but we also had 12 bowls of food to spare. Sound familiar? Like-Matthew-14-Feeding-of-the-5000-familiar? I was dumbfounded.
At the beginning of the trip, I had meditated on Matthew 6:26-27 which says, “look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?”
During the semester prior to the trip I spent quite a bit of time worrying up a storm of “cubits” as undergraduate graduation approached. Anxiousness and unrest plagued me. But throughout the semester God showed me his care in so many ways—those are stories for later blogs. And then, at every turn of the DR trip, and especially during the miraculous feast, God made very clear that He would care for me no matter where I went or what I did.
GAME-CHANGER.
Since then, that “birds of the air” theme has been the crux of my faith in grad school and beyond.
Fast forward to now. In Bible Study Fellowship (BSF) this year, we’re studying People of the Promised Land and just finished reading 1 Samuel 9 where Samuel anoints Saul as king.
While Saul turns out to be a bummer of a king, the story of his journey to the throne inspired me. One day, he leaves his house in search of his father’s lost donkeys. Long story short, when Saul meets Samuel, Samuel says the donkeys had been found and appoints Saul as king of Israel! (Read 1 Samuel 9…lots more detail to the story that makes it even better…)
Saul thinks he’s out on a trip to look for donkeys, but God has an entirely different plan for him.
I got to thinking, Saul probably felt comfortable searching for those donkeys…maybe his father had even trained him to care for the donkeys. And at the end of the day, he could go home to a land familiar to him with his family around. This was his gig. But instead, God called him to a totally unexpected job.
So yes, most recently I completed training to teach and that career seems incredibly comfortable to me—both of my parents are educators so I've grown up with that and teaching comes with reliable pay and benefits. But I don’t know if that’s a) what I want to do and b) where God is calling me.
Now, I’m not out here saying that teaching is like herding donkeys (let’s be clear, it’s like herding blind cats) or hoping God puts me on the path to king/queen-hood (Beyoncé and Mariska Hargitay already wear the crown, so that’s a lost cause anyway). Rather, Saul’s story of total reversal comforts me.
God’s already turned my expectations upside-down in so many wonderful ways, I don’t even know why I think I make “good” plans. My little high school home-body-brain expected to go to college in Washington, but instead God took me 2,000 miles across the country to Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee. I expected to major in Education as an undergraduate student, but God put stories on my heart then, and I switched to Journalism.
Then I had the opportunity to pursue Education, too, and I expected I’d go right into that after graduation. But now that doesn't seem quite right.
Don't get me wrong, I loved learning to teach—and through student teaching and the Ed program at Lipscomb I learned SO MUCH about myself and the world. Not a moment of it was wasted even if I don’t pursue that life right now.
Encouragement for you if you’re on the post-collegiate job search (but I also say this for myself): people in the world are going to come ask you why you aren’t doing “x, y, and z” things they expect you should do to get on the path to “success” (money, your own house, stability, a position high up in a company, insurance, self-sufficiency, etc.) But those things DO NOT matter to God. In fact, He asks us to be dependent on Him and He will take care of you and me more than “the birds of the air.” Lean into His word and listen for His voice. You are part of His big story.
And, as T. Swift wisely advised, “haters gonna hate…hate…hate…hate…hate” but you’ve just got to “shake it off.”
So for now, I'm substitute teaching while I search for what's next. And I have stories on my heart again...there sure are a lot of them to tell. Stay tuned--you never know when a story familiar to you could turn up on the site 😉
-Katie B.
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