Wandering in the Desert

I am so much like the Israelites as they wandered in the wilderness. Like them I come to the Lord on my knees saying 'I've messed it up, can you fix it for me?' and, ever so faithfully, He does. He pours out His mercy and His love and says 'Do better this time', my reply always comes 'This time, Lord, I am going to get it right'. And I do. For a time. I seek Him and I really do want to know and participate in His plan for my life. But then nothing happens. It's not that God stops His work in me or that He abandons me at all, but the pace gets too slow for my taste, and I begin to move into a very purposeless way of life. It's never that I specifically begin doing any 'big sin', but I stop making a point of doing things for the Lord and I settle into my comfortable routine of school, friends, netflix, and sleep. There is nothing wrong with any of those things, but they shouldn't be my entire life. There is so much more for me. And I know it. Even sloshing through that routine, I know it. Something always seems to happen near the end of the calendar year the jolts me out of this slump. (Yes, my Israel inspired cycle of faithfulness is consistent enough that I know when things are coming.) and then I crawl back to the scarred feet of Christ and I say 'I've messed it up, can you fix it for me?' and, ever so faithfully, He does.
I watched this cycle happen again this year as it has just about every year since I first decided to follow Christ. The final few weeks of the semester, I started to look at my life at school, it was fine, but fine wasn't what I had come for. At my first experience at a passion conference this time last year, I had said 'Lord, whatever school I end up at, I know that you put me there, and you put me there for a purpose.' I should have gone to school expectant of what the Lord had in store, but instead I went expectant of what I had in store. And at the time, what I had in store was simple and comfortable and nice, and I liked it. But as finals drew near and I called to mind this yearly cycle that I go through, I thought, 'oh no, what is going to happen this time?' and then, nothing happened. Nothing happened. Nothing happened. And nothing happened. Things weren't just not going wrong either, they were going right, with everything that I expected to be the thing that brought me to my knees, were actually lifting me up in the way that I was living. BUT I began to look back on the semester that I had, and I thought about the prayer that I had prayed at the beginning of 2015 and realized that I was not doing much toward the plan that I had thought God had had for me at USC. I began to doubt if I had really made the right decision, did God actually want me somewhere else? Had I messed up His plan by choosing the wrong school? And with those doubts came more doubts. What if I'm not really doing enough or the right things to be a Christian. I had a plan for my answer to this question later in this post, and I felt like I knew the answer, but typing it now, I realize that I have spent my entire afternoon since I've gotten home from Passion worried about this very thing, 'I need to be in scripture enough and I need to be listening to only worship music and watching more videos of sermons' and the tears begin to roll because I know just how untrue that is. I feel like every time God is trying to tell me something, I hear it the first time and I say 'Yeah, God, I've got it, you don't have to keep pressing this point' and He replies, 'well, you clearly still just don't get it, so I'm going to keep on driving it home until it actually clicks'. After spending a whole weekend listening to God say 'stop worrying about you doing enough to have your name written in the book of life, you made a choice and your name is in there permanently and you doing all of this is not making a difference, it is done.' and still I come home and think 'If i just try harder'.