Day One

Here dies the first day of this grand adventure. For as much as I've done that may seem crazy to an outsider, up to this point the moves I've made and risks I've taken have been quite measured. I double and triple check safety gear, I do not quit a job until another is secure. My ducks are kept firmly ensconced in the row in which I've placed them. I am not reckless. Today starts a shift away from those habits, and my ducks are clumped, frightened and facing every which way.
This morning I awoke, made coffee, showered and dressed for work as I have done for the past two years (though I gave myself an extra half-hour of sleep). I made an office space for myself and a schedule, written in sharpie like it was the word of God. My hands rested on the keyboard in the way I learned to hold them back in typing class. I breathed, said a prayer, and began the day.

It was a full and productive. I am brimming with ideas, most of which will prove to go nowhere. I've had encouragement from unlikely sources. I am 90% sure this is the move I'm to be making. I have no evidence to support this theory.

My mind keeps going back to planting. At my old job, we worked with restoring old mined sites. These sites were certified cleared of mining influence, but were old areas where the soil had been so compacted that only scrub plants could grow; nothing long-term or healthy could survive with soil that hard and compressed. Roots couldn't penetrate the unnatural hardpan. My former company would go in and rip up the scrub plants. They would till the hardened soil over and over again, breaking up the clumps and once again adding air to the earth. And only when the soil was loosened was it ready to be planted with the seeds of the long-term, the seeds that would take it from scrub land to healthy forest, that place it was supposed to be all along. There was destruction in the process of construction, something I'm realizing is almost universally true.
I can say that on day one.

Diving Board

I lost my job this morning.
I wasn't expecting it consciously, though I think somewhere in my mind I suspected a change was coming.

I was a novice grant writer, hired to find funds based only on my gumption, my charisma and my writing skills. I successfully got grants but they need someone with more experience and I simply can't provide that. If it were a bigger office and I could be mentored, this wouldn't be a conversation, but unfortunately, they are small. I don't blame them for the termination; I'd do the same thing. I'll miss them all terribly. I love—and I mean LOVE—my coworkers. I love my bosses, love the board, love the members. My office was a truly fun place to work; they are friends and they matter to me. I haven't a single bad thing to say about them, and I'm assured that feeling is mutual. I leave with great recommendations and the knowledge that I'd be an enthusiastic rehire if they could find a place for me. All of that is good.

Here's a secret: when people ask me what my dream job is, the answer has always been a writer, but I've felt like it was insensible to say so. I love to write; I love words. I love forming thoughts and arguments onto paper. Writing breathes life into me and I want to believe it does the same for my readers. I don't know if it is my gift, but given the choice I'd like it to be.
And so, I finally admit it: what I want to be when I grow up isn't a grants manager for a conservation nonprofit (though that was great), it's to be a writer. A real one. A published one. But what to write? I haven't a clue. I want to speak truth. In a quiet way, I am relieved to be let go.

Maybe this is it, the kick off the diving board toward doing what I so dearly love to do. I'm terrified. Right now the lake looks cold, I'm unsure of my swimming skills and that water's surface is coming fast.

No Distinction from the Stars

I became a member of my church yesterday. Never thought I'd be one to consider committing to something like this, but I'm happy I did it. As part of my membership ceremony, I was asked to speak about how I feel called to serve. Frankly, I don't know how I'm called, or what I have to offer. It is a glorious notion made impossibly complex in action.

Anyway, here is what I said:
Several years ago, I worked for an adventure camp based in Virginia, and would spend much of the summer on an old school bus, taking kids around to various sites in the region to do different activities. I was on the younger, 8-10 year old trip when we pulled up to our campsite in rural West Virginia. The site was situated in a beautiful cove, on the flood plain of the south branch of the Potomac River. Looking up was mountains, looking around was lush grass with the river just beyond it. It was gorgeous. That night was cloudless and moonless, and we let the fire die down and all the campers lay on their backs to look at the stars. The milky way stretched across the sky like a great, glowing ribbon, and to our left and right the fireflies twinkled and danced. Seemingly thousands of fireflies flew around us and when they floated overhead they made no distinction from the stars.


It was a great scene of wonder. It felt like we were blanketed by the stars; those living and breathing insects around us, and the endless heavens above. The kids were left speechless, a miracle in and of itself.
The next morning we were packing up camp, and I heard a little girl scream. She came running toward me, yelling about a horrid insect that had landed on her shirt. She demanded I kill it immediately. I gently pulled it off her and saw it was a firefly. I told her this but she didn't care. A firefly in the daylight is just another beetle.

That image has stuck with me for years, especially when I think of God's calling on my life. Something that shone like stars in the right setting was unspectacular in the wrong one. How very much I feel like those insects when I am not where I'm supposed to be. I am nothing when I am not in the place to which I am called. I inspire no sense of God's mighty creation with my life. And so God calls me to leave the safe ordinary nature of the daylight and proceed into the night to be a light. The creator calls me to be more than just a beetle. What a terrifying prospect.
I know that I am not called because I am particularly talented; I am called because I am not. When I think I am qualified, then I believe I can do the job myself and I leave no space for God to guide. It succeeds on my qualifications and not God's. It becomes about me.

And so I don't know what I am called to do as a part of this community. I'm more often than not completely unsure of what I have to offer at any given moment in the first place. But I desire to serve, to discuss, to engage—I desire to learn and to teach, to root and to bloom. I desire to be a light, as you have been lights to me. I think of our church community as that West Virginia flood plain: the purple ink of the night sky full of stars, the blades of summer grass dotted with each one of us, shining in the way we were created to shine, serving as a light in the darkness, signaling to each other that we are recognized, we are known and we are loved for being precisely where--and how--we are supposed to be. We answer the call to our purpose.

(my church is Land of the Sky United Church of Christ)