I am getting ready to graduate…..again.

I have spent countless hours reading, researching, writing papers, fixing APA formatting, staring at my computer screen, and wondering how five-week classes can somehow feel five months long. And now, somehow, I am almost done.

I should feel excited, and part of me is. I am proud of what I have accomplished, and I know how much work went into getting here. Finishing another graduate degree while working, raising four kids, and juggling everything else that comes with normal life is not a small thing. But if I am being completely truthful, excitement isn't the strongest thing I feel right now. Uncertainty is.

There is something strange about getting close to a finish line you have been working toward for so long and realizing you don't completely know what comes after it. For months, I have known exactly what I needed to do next. Finish this assignment. Read these articles. Write this discussion post. Take this quiz. Turn in this paper. Start the next class. There was always another box to check, and suddenly I am running out of boxes.

My final research has made that feeling even more complicated, because I chose something I genuinely care about: volunteer-led mission organizations and the challenges they face when planning processes have to be recreated over and over again. I have spent weeks buried in research about volunteers, organizational learning, knowledge management, planning, burnout, and what happens when organizations depend heavily on people who are already giving so much of themselves. Somewhere along the way, this stopped feeling like just another school paper. I started recognizing things I have experienced myself, questions I have wondered about, and problems I have watched people work around. More than once, I stopped in the middle of reading something and thought, there has to be a better way to do this.

That has been exciting, but it has also made the uncertainty louder. What do I do with all of this now? I have spent years earning degrees, learning, researching, and building skills. I know more today than I did when I started, and I have accomplished things that, at different points in my life, probably would have sounded impossible. Yet I don't have a beautiful five-year plan sitting in front of me. I don't know exactly where all of this education leads. I don't know which opportunities will open, which ideas will work, or whether some of the things I have dreamed about will become something significant or simply teach me something along the way.

That is a surprisingly uncomfortable place to stand. We talk a lot about having faith when we are starting something difficult, but I don't think we talk nearly as much about the faith required when we finish. Finishing means releasing the thing that has been giving our days structure and asking, okay, God, what now? Maybe I expected graduation to answer that question. Instead, I think graduation is making me ask it.

I wish I could say I am walking into this next season completely confident about what comes next, but I'm not. I am proud, grateful, tired, curious, hopeful, and incredibly uncertain, all at the same time. I am beginning to think those things are allowed to exist together. I don't have to diminish what I have accomplished simply because I don't know what comes next, and I don't need to have the next five years figured out before I celebrate what it took to get here.

So this August, I am trying to let the finish line simply be a finish line instead of immediately turning it into a demand for the next goal. I want to look back at the work, the late nights, the research, the frustration, the growth, and everything it took to get here, and allow myself to say: I finished. I don't know exactly what comes next yet. Maybe, for right now, I don't have to.

Olivia Tressler

Founder, Compass Missions