“So, any plans for next year? What do you want to do?”

The question bursts from inquiring lips like an unwelcome intruder. It rises up on playing fields and market streets, in lecture halls and drinks receptions. I know its presence like a pebble in my shoe, but still it rears its ugly head. In the apt words of Tracy Beaker, I want to tell it to "bog off". But when you inform people that you’re in your last year of university (rookie error, I know), there is truly nowhere to escape. On some days, I have no problem voicing uncertainty, letting that bubble of future doubt float in the air and land in my inquisitor’s lap, with a silent "pop". On other days, I absolutely dread it. This is not so much when someone else asks me the question as when I make an enquiry of myself. Where do you see yourself in 5 years’ time, Sarah? What contribution do you want to make as an active member of society?

At school, I would tell people I wanted to be a journalist. A solid, respectable career with room for a modicum of creative expression (what was I thinking?). But I realise now that this was an impulse response to satisfy grown ups’ questions, and a path that I don’t think I had fully thought through. That revelation left me scrambling for answers. What would I become? An academic? A Bible translation consultant? A poet? Hearing about my friends and their job interviews and recruitment days, their grad schemes and Master’s applications, I feel split down the middle and glued back together. I’m truly, desperately happy for them. I want to see them succeed. These are the people whose weddings I’ll attend, whose birthday drinks I will flip around my calendar for, whose children I hope will one day call me ‘auntie’. But when they seem one step closer to that future than I am, fear clenches an angry fist.

Our plans should always be caveated

Perhaps the reason I get apprehensive is my realisation that this is the first time I will have to make a decision for myself, about what I am actually going to do. Up until now, in a way, our lives have been laid out. We complete primary school to get to secondary school. We complete GCSEs to complete A-levels and A-levels to get into university. We have a choice about what subject to do, or what institution to apply for, but the next stage is pretty much there for you, ready and waiting. This, it seems to me, is the first time where I can truly choose to do whatever I want.

Or can I? A conversation I had with a friend the other day turned quickly to the topic of predestination and free will, as they often do. Do we actually have free will? Or are we just wired to act in our ‘best interests’, implying that whatever we do is predetermined by biological natural instinct? Other issues emerge when you add God into the picture. Does a God who knows everything mean I can actually choose freely, or do I have to act in a certain way to accord with the future God knows?

And what does this all have to do with my post-uni gap year, parliamentary internship, or law conversion course? Absolutely everything, if you’ll let it. Our concern for our free will feeds into very nature of our discussions on what lies beyond, because humans are funny creatures. We plan our lives as if we are in control of them, and we speak about the future as if it actually existed to us. Many minds more learned than myself have claimed there is no such thing as the future. Just tiny successive present moments all frothing up to one big narrative of our own lives.

This isn’t to say that we should stop all plans, cease all job applications, and live in the present moment. I’m not that radical. But there is beauty in uncertainty. A society where the default question to primary school children is "what do you want to be when you grow up?" is a society obsessed with progression. How is what you’re doing today helping the you of tomorrow? Tomorrow’s you is just another you in a different "today". What if we asked "what are you doing now?", "where do you see yourself, in the present?" or "what does this current moment hold for you?" just as much as the alternative? Perhaps a bold reorientation of priorities. Or perhaps, knowing that career paths are fickle, to ask "what do you want to be?" would illicit different answers. Not about corporate prospects or qualifications, but actual human characteristics. Generous with my time, sacrificially loving, faithful and self-controlled: this is who I want to be when I grow up.

Still, eventually, there will come a point down the line where I will have to make some plans. Whether that be an internship, or volunteering, travelling, or just whiling away the days experimenting with what I love most – words – I’ll know that those plans are exactly that. Plans. Nothing more and nothing less. James 4:14-15 tells us that we are “a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” A sobering, but necessary thought. It reminds us that our plans should always be caveated, and instead of arrogant boasting our refrain should be: “If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.” For me, this is a vision of a future cloaked in mystery, veiled in a shroud of that mist of which we are composed. It is a future that shimmers on the horizon, but looks very different when it emerges at the sunrise, up close.