My Myers-Briggs personality type is INTJ. The T stands for "thinking". The opposite of which is "feeling". The difference is, essentially, how you process emotions. In simple terms, Feelers generally have extroverted emotions, though that doesn't mean they are extroverted. Feelers' actions are led by their emotions. This is not a bad thing. At its best, it could be someone who's changing the world through passionate emotion for a human-rights cause or compassionately caring for the sick and poor. Thinkers generally have introverted emotions, and in extreme cases, can be seen as Spock-like people without feelings, which is not saying Thinkers don't feel anything.
The Thinking vs Feeling is often scored as a percentage, so you could fall anywhere within that range. There are a lot of other factors that can determine where you're scored, including even your mood during the time you're taking the test. I'm scored about 70% towards Thinking.
My entire life, I've been an introverted feeler. In short, I've never liked to express emotions around other people, because it makes me uncomfortable. For a time, I didn't even know if I knew how to feel any emotion at all. There were days where I would just sit and wonder if I'd ever really been happy or if I'd ever really been sad or angry or anything at all. When my family had to put down the dog I'd grown up with, I didn't cry one tear, though I thought I should since it was supposed to be a sad time. When the youngest of my older brothers left home in bad circumstances, I cried, and the next day I was "fine", which really just meant I ignored everything that had to do with him.
Through counseling, I finally realized that it wasn't that I didn't feel things. Rather, I felt things very strongly and very deeply, but I was bottling everything up inside, and I wasn't allowing myself to feel anything, because I despised feeling emotions that much. As I've continued to mature and grow spiritually, I've learned that it's okay to openly express my emotions, though it's still not exactly natural to me.
But what does this have to do with the title of this post? Well... In short, I have cried and internally raged more times in the last six months than I have in my entire life. I have pleaded with God for signs and open doors, and I have begged for relief from the misery of overwhelming emotion. I don't think there are many people who enjoy crying themselves to sleep because they never got a response to an application for their dream job.
The last six months have been a period of intense, emotional waiting. I've had a deep feeling of discontentment, and though I'd prefer that the waiting would have ended right after it started, it didn't. In fact, I'm still waiting. I'm working part-time while spending hours applying for jobs I'll never even get the courtesy of a rejection e-mail from. I'm reading my Bible and praying for signs as I go to sleep only to wake up with nothing. I've gone through intense spiritual depression but also spiritual conviction about God's timing and God's plan. But that doesn't mean waiting is any easier.
I've been trying to figure out where the line between reading too much into what I want (i.e. taking something as a "sign" it's supposed to happen when it's actually not) and discerning the timing of God's plan for my life. When you strongly desire something, it's easy to decide it's part of God's plan for your life. Why else would you have this intense desire for a particular job or a particular country if it wasn't planted there by God Himself?
For a number of months now, I've been thinking about moving to Korea permanently/indefinitely. I've been praying for jobs that would make use of my expensive 4-year degree (hello, student loans!) and for a clear answer.
-I prayed for a sign of snow, and I woke up to down-pouring rain. Was that a "maybe"? Rain is liquid snow, after all.
-I saw a job posting on LinkedIn for my absolute dream job. I applied, but I never heard back. Was that a "no" sign?
-I have had 8 different people message me separately in the past 3 months asking if I'm going to Korea this year. Were those "yes" signs?
-I helped a girl from the university that I graduated from, also an adoptee, work through her visa application and paperwork so she could do the same exchange program that I did in 2016. Was this a hopeful sign?
All I can say is, I don't know. But what would waiting truly be if we knew? It wouldn't truly be waiting. Waiting requires longing. Waiting requires patience. Waiting requires trust that something is going to happen eventually. The word "waiting" is a noun, not an action verb, though it implies action: a gerund.
Waiting (n): the action of staying where one is or delaying action until a particular time or until something else happens
Focus in on "until something else happens". For waiting to end, something has to happen. The question is, what is that "something"?
