Waiting....

I am trying to keep myself very busy this week because Friday is one of the biggest days in my professional life. All I need is to find my name on a list around lunchtime on Friday. That's right, the Tennessee Board of Law Examiners lets you know if you passed the Bar Exam by putting your name on a successful list on their web page. It is the culmination of 5 years of law school, 3 months of Bar prep and 2 days of taking the Bar Exam in late July. I haven't started to get nervous yet but I'm sure Thursday will be one of the longest days of my life and who knows how I will feel on Friday morning.

I do take comfort in the fact that my job will never define who I am as a man and there are worse things in this world than taking the Bar Exam again. I also know that I did everything I could have done to prepare myself for this test. That being said, I really don't want to spend another 3 months preparing for that test. My short term fate will be decided in less than 4 days. If I pass, I look forward to jump starting my own practice, long work hours and lawyer jokes. When I started this journey to go back to school after being graduated from college for 5 years, I decided I wanted to do something that would allow me to be self-employed and also provide for my family. I was done with the days of someone else telling me what to do and how to do it. It is a little nerve racking thinking about starting a practice from scratch but that is what I signed up for. Add in the fact that our son will be here in December and the pressure rises just a bit.

I have been blessed that my wife Autumn has had a great job for the last nine years and has afforded me the opportunity to go to lawschool and chase this dream. I think my desire to go to lawschool started when I was working in a job that required me to crawl under houses and sell foundation repair and water drainage systems. I can remember going to my friend Chris' lawschool graduation and being somewhat inspired to go back to school. Maybe I should have skipped that graduation and saved myself all the reading, stress and time it takes to complete a law degree. I took the route of going to Nashville School of Law at night and it is a 4 year program that I crammed into 5 years. I thought I was smart enough to cruise through my first year of school and because of a slightly lower than required GPA, I was advised that I would need to retake the 2 classes that I received Ds in. I buckled down for the next 4 years and worked a 40 hour a week job and went to school at night. Needless to say, I have been very busy over the last 5 years. Hopefully Friday will be the beginning of the next chapter of my life.

I have several friends that are in the same boat as me and we will all be looking for each others names after we, hopefully, find our names on the list. I know all of you guys are just as anxious as I am for Friday to get here. We are just tired of waiting and we want to now if our future holds starting our law careers or 3 more months of Bar preparation. Either way, I am a blessed man with a great wife and family. I am going to be a dad in 2 months and that little boy probably doesn't care if I'm a lawyer or not. I just hope that I can be a great father and husband like my dad is and everything else will work out in God's time.