Tag: life

Off the Map

Sometimes we end up off the map. Life was going along at a predictable, comfortable pace, or toward a place we could see, and then it isn’t. We’re left scrambling, confused, things are different. We don’t know how we got where we are and maybe we don’t know what to do or where to go from here.

This was part of conversation from a couple days ago. Being off the map is not a bad thing, it’s just different, and unexpected. It’s new territory. In many cases, it can be necessary. Because when we depend too much on maps and plans and where we are going, we lose the ability to see what is in front of us. We think we know what’s coming, so we don’t focus on what’s here. Being off the map can mean the freedom to be present.

Meister Eckhart is a Christian mystic I come back to again and again. He sees the beauty of beginnings, “And suddenly you know: it’s time to start something new and trust the magic of beginnings.” Add to that his, “be willing to be a beginner every single morning.” He echoes Christ telling us that unless we are willing to give up our old lives and be born again of water and the spirit, we are missing out. Both are pushing us off the map of what we thought life was going to be and into the possibility, the unknown of what life could be.

It’s more than a little unnerving to let go of what we (think we) know. And it’s a process, getting to a place to embrace beginnings, to let go. Sometimes one we didn’t ask to be a part of. But it’s also a process that starts before we realize it:

In the out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

That’s John O’Donohue, walking us into new territory in “For a New Beginning.” I get where he is coming from. I’ve used the term “restless leg syndrome for the soul,” where you have this feeling where you can’t settle, but can’t fully identify or articulate. But you know something is up. Let me turn it back over to O’Donohue:

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

Maybe when we focus on the map, we lose ourselves. Maybe the map we thought we were looking at, no longer describes where we are or where we want to go. Maybe it limits us, and it is in looking up, looking around us, and seeing in a new way, that we open ourselves up to possibility.

Because We Can

He wasn’t the real Mark Twain. But he was to us, sitting in an elementary school gym, white suit and mustache, telling stories. And we sat spellbound listening to a man who looked and sounded like Twain. We laughed til our sides hurt, leaned forward to hear what happened next, and teared up as he talked about the power, terror, and finality of the atomic bomb.

Almost 40 years later, I feel like I am sitting in that gym again, reading Neruda’s, “Ode to the Atom:”

Infinitesimal
star,
you seemed
forever
buried
in metal, hidden,
your diabolic
fire.
One day
someone knocked
at your tiny
door:
it was man.
With one
explosion
he unchained you,
you saw the world,
you came out
into the daylight,
you traveled through
cities,
your great brilliance
illuminated lives,
you were a
terrible fruit
of electric beauty

Neruda goes on to describe the horror at Hiroshima, the ordinary day and ordinary lives that were no more.

He uses the phrase, “terrible fruit,” which is meant to send us back to the garden and another fruit with consequences.

“That’s why we can’t have nice things,” is a phrase I like to use; it makes me smile while at the same time shaking my head. It applies to so aptly to so much of the world right now. We do things because we can. If we are able to do something, we must be meant to do it, right? We can take remarkable scientific discoveries and twist and turn them in ways that can destroy the planet; we can take absolutely stunning sweeps of land and landscape, and see it as a resource to be used, rather than creation to be enjoyed and appreciated. We can look at one another as competition, or as enemies not be trusted, rather than with kindness and cooperation. We can, we have the ability, to do all those things.

But what we end up with–war, pollution, a culture of outrage and hate–is a result of that view and those actions. How we see things and how we act, give us what we get.

At different points in our lives, I think each of us has seen, felt, or understood that things could be different than that. That life could be different. That the world could be different. We get to choose.

Whether you read the Bible, history books, or study psychology, we have read about and can understand other ways of living. At some point in our lives, maybe we can point to times, moments, people, when life felt incredible, our thoughts and hearts were elevated, and we got this feeling that we were on the verge of understanding  or being something more. Maybe it’s the feeling of being on vacation, or for a child, the feeling of Christmas morning. But then it fades and we are back to real life, our world of bills, deadlines, heartbreak, and sickness.

What if life, what if God was continually giving us clues how to bridge the gap–to make both lives the same? What if God knows we can do whatever we want, “because we can,” but is pulling for us to see things differently, and to make a life, and help make a world, where there is order, peace, and love, rather than everything running unchecked because it can?

What if by paying attention, by looking inside ourselves, and looking to God, we can rewrite our lives in ways we’ve only dreamed about?

Those are questions worth asking, conversations worth having, and a life and love to explore.

Everyday People, Everyday Grace

give me
the daily
struggle,
because these things are my song,
and so we will go together
shoulder to shoulder
– Pablo Neruda, “Invisible Man”

Neruda saw the universe in an artichoke, birds, tomatoes, socks, seaweed, and stamps. And in the people he encountered everyday: a bricklayer, a woman gardening, or a couple on the street.

My first double-take at Neruda was in the late 1990s, out of college, trying to figure out what should occupy my thoughts, where life was going to go, how to put things together. Funny, I’m still wondering those same things. A friend brought “Elemental Odes” around and Neruda takes the time to look at the everyday world around us, to really look at it, and see deeply into it. He elevates the humble. Everything is full of stories and we are connected to all of them. In the same poem, “Invisible Man,” he feels everything around him:

but I smile,
because when I walk through the streets
… life flows around me
like rivers

When my head gets stuck in the clouds, I often turn to Neruda’s odes as a way to reconnect. Sipping coffee in the morning, listening to birds in the yard, watching the dog bum-rush the bird feeder, or being in a church full of 700 people–pouring out into the parish hall and under a tent, rain coming down–brought together by the love of one person who connected us all. Each of these things, from the simple, to the profound can be an act of everyday grace, connecting everyday people, if we choose to look at them that way.

I know “Everyday People” is a Sly and the Family Stone song, but the version I hear in my head with that phrase is the Arrested Development hip hop version, “People Everyday.”

We are all people everyday and that’s what we’ve got to work with. Through struggle, uncertainty, celebration, and joy, we get up and we go. Anything we are going to come to know, we are only going to find through our everyday lives. When we find and feel grace in those moments, we find something more. I dig what Anne Lamott has to say about grace in “Traveling Mercies:”

“It’s unearned love–the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It’s the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually as grateful as you are to be there.”

I wake up, let the dog out, put coffee on. I walk through the yard, hearing traffic from the highway, I look at the tomatoes growing, and I sit down to read, to pray, to remember, to be grateful. And I hope to find, to connect with, to be everyday people living into everyday grace.

Frosting or Fountainhead

Imagination and creativity are the mind’s stepchildren when it comes to priorities in society. When we call someone imaginative or creative, it sounds like a pat on the head. Art is something we indulge when we have time, when the important things are taken care of. What if we have things upside down?

“What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?” – Rollo May

I miss artist Joe Mayer being in town. I got to know Joe when he was living in Easton, teaching art workshops, getting businesses to hang art by local artists, and philosophizing at Coffee East just about every morning. Joe was painting abstract watercolors and we talked art, writing, and life a good bit. Joe did a quick warm-up painting and wrote the above Rollo May quote on it. It has hung in my house ever since. May wondered what would happen if we looked at imagination and creativity differently. What if we gave them a spot at the head of the table?

What if our lives are our canvas? What if the decisions we make every day as to how to spend our time, what to focus on–what if we looked at those choices as creative acts?

Mike Vallely is constantly creating things. Mike V. is a professional skateboarder, who founded, owns and runs a company called Street Plant Brand. I met him in Ocean City when I was a teenager. His life, his company, his passion, his art are all creative acts.  He sings and plays music in bands, he has helped create what we think of as street skateboarding, works with and promotes artists, and makes his life about sharing his passion with other people. His motto is “Skate. Create. Enjoy.”

Author Bob Goff thinks of Tom Sawyer Island at Disneyland as his office. He does some of his best thinking there and meets with people there. Why? From his book, “Love Does:”

“We all want to have a place where we can dream and escape anything that wraps steel bands around our imagination and creativity. Tom Sawyer Island is a place where I conspire with people, where immense capers have been launched, and where whimsy runs wild.”

Bob G. and Mike V. dream different dreams for their lives, but each of them have made their lives about following and achieving those dreams. They put their imagination into practice. It’s not art in the sense of learning to paint, it’s art in the sense of learning to live.

God’s created each of us to be unique–with our own dreams, loves, fears, passions, and imaginations. And we each have our own lives. When we set out to align our dreams and our lives, and use our imagination and creativity to build them into one, we move toward the life God intended us to live–based on wiring us that way. I think that’s what Rollo May is talking about. What if art and imagination aren’t the frosting or the fringe, but the focus or the fountainhead?

What can we create, or make of our lives? What do we have to say?

 

You Don’t Know How it Feels

Tom Petty was right. I don’t know how it feels to be him. Or anybody else. And no one else knows how I feel, really. And that can be one of the lowest, loneliest feelings, sitting with the fact when it comes to how we feel and what we go through, that we keep running into places and points that we are sure that no one else gets it.

And I think probably we’ve all been there and that we’ll end up back there when it comes to dealing with other people. As close as we get to someone, or as long as we’ve known someone, things can still happen that throw us for a loop and leave us in the land of alone.

Then we have those moments when a glimpse of light shines in. They can often come at seemingly random and unexpected times. As C. S. Lewis put it, “Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.” I can’t hear that quote now without seeing Charlie Mackesy‘s sketch in my mind. I like that the drawing moves beyond just people.

I go back to a Sunday afternoon during high school when a bunch of us were skimboarding on Boone Creek, a picture perfect Eastern Shore day on the water, when out of nowhere a friend said, “Did you ever have the thought where everyone else in the world is a robot and you are the only real person?” And I stopped in my tracks, astounded that anyone else thought that stuff, because it seemed like a thing that was just for sci-fi books, not conversation with your friends, and I had thoughts like that several times a day.

We all live out different scenarios and imaginings in our heads that we think are only ours. It takes guts to put them out there, and sometimes they fall on deaf ears, but sometimes, there is hope that not everyone else is a robot. Or maybe that is part of their robot plan 😉

The funny thing is, the older we get and the more of those thoughts we have stored up, the more quirky we feel like they are to the point where we are sure no one else could understand. And we’ve had more time and experience to be broken, to feel lost, to be confused. So when a connected moment like that happens, we can almost lose our breath.

Shared connected moments are sometimes just that: moments. Encouragement and affirmation; a nudge to keep going. Maybe we can share ourselves and provide a moment like that for someone else, maybe we encounter someone who does that for us.

I know when it comes to parenting right now, I have a 16 year old who might as well be quoting Tom Petty in just about any conversation we have. And sometimes I say, you know, at 46 I still feel that way. Sometimes people don’t know how it feels. But we all share that feeling, of not being understood. Of no one getting it, or us.

And that comes in different waves and different depths. T. H. White, in his book “The Once and Future King,” throws the full depth of that struggle out there:

“There was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned. There was a time when it was of vital interest to us to find out whether there was a God or not… Further back, there were times when we wondered with all our souls what the world was, what love was, what we were ourselves.”

I dig those kind of questions and that kind of discussion. But in our busy lives, it doesn’t have to run that deep. Sometimes it’s just wondering if anyone else puts their hand out for lightning bugs to land on, or still skips shells, or likes hot sauce on their eggs, or tries to find their own new constellations when they look at the stars.

But I think part of what I take from White, part of what I want to tell my daughter, part of what I need to remind myself, is that before we get too caught up with whether anyone else feels what we feel, we first have to spend time with, reflect on, pray on, understand what we ourselves are feeling.

We don’t know what it feels like to be Tom Petty. Do we really know what it feels like to be ourselves?

“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” – Carl Jung

Who are you when you look into the fire of your own heart? Then let’s ask what we do with that in the world.

More Subtle Than a Two by Four

God sometimes speaks with a two-by-four. That’s helpful for me because I’m frequently dense enough to miss something more subtle. I need to be knocked upside the head from time to time.

Sometimes though, we just get glimpses and it is up to us to take notice. In his book, “Tales of Wonder,” Huston Smith adapts the term grace notes to describe these glimpses or moments:

“I must have been under six that early morning I stumbled out barefoot into our backyard. The moist dew under my feet felt fresh, exciting between my toes. Its freshness penetrated every atom of my body. The day was just dawning, the sun was coming out, cool and warmth intermingled, and I knew that everything would be just right. I use the musical term grace notes to describe such moments, when our perspective shifts and we suddenly glimpse perfection beyond words.”

Those moments can happen anytime, as long as we are paying attention. I see them with sunrises and sunsets; I catch them while reading or running. I feel them when finding spinning pinwheels planted in front of the church after a Pentecost worship service. Or in taking the time to notice and help a dragonfly who needed a hand.

 

It means we have to redirect our focus off of where we are going or what we are doing next and take time to be in the present. I don’t think we can hear God speaking in the future, but we’ve got a chance to hear him in the here and now.

In her book, “An Altar in the World,” Barbara Brown Taylor goes back to the story of Moses and the burning bush, through which God speaks to Moses. Brown Taylor points out that the burning bush was not right in front of Moses–he had to stop what he was doing and turn aside to go see it. If he hadn’t, if he’d stayed on his task of tending sheep, he would have missed it and wouldn’t be the Moses we read about.

“What made him Moses was his willingness to turn aside. Wherever else he was supposed to be going and whatever else he was supposed to be doing, he decided it could wait for a minute.”

And that made all the difference. I wonder if we would? Or if I would? I try. I am pretty good about seeing the sky start to turn a sublime color and dropping lunch making or laundry folding and heading out to investigate.

Or having lunch outside and listening, breathing, and centering. But I used to be better about finding and helping create those moments with my daughters. If you posit God as a loving parent, then our own chances to be creative, loving, listening parents/shepherds/counselors/friends (I don’t think that is relegated to being parents) to others should and do provide countless opportunities for us to experience something of the love of God, by putting it out into the world ourselves. I have to sit with that more. I have to be that more often.

Sometimes in the frustration of parenting teenagers, which absolutely needs to be done–in the midst of grades and attitude and apathy–I lose sight of, and don’t make the opportunities to fill their (and my own) hearts and minds and days with the kind of creative joy and love that I want to. I have heard, felt, and experienced love through Anna and Ava in ways I will never be able to show enough gratitude for. I need to live into that more.

Brown Taylor cites a character in Alice Walker’s book, “The Color Purple,” who says, “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”

We’ve all got our color purple moments. Our grace notes. Our burning bushes. Our chances to notice and to be differently in the world. To make time.

Note to self: notice purple; don’t walk by burning bushes; cultivate the smiles, the questions, the adventures, that begin from the inside and launch their way into the world. That way maybe God doesn’t have to break out the two-by-four so often.

On Being Born

The last five years have been off the map. If you’d sat down with me on this day in 2013 and told me what the view in 2018 would look like, I’d have backed away slowly. And yet, they are some of the most important and beautiful years in shaping who I am, for better or worse.

One thing I remember clearly, when summer came and the Coast Guard contract we were working on ended, I was out of a job and searching for a direction. And I remember reading Frederick Buechner and having this overwhelming feeling that I should go to seminary; that there was something about a journey of faith that was key. I look back at Buechner’s words that I found again recently:

“Listen to your life. Listen to what happens to you because it is through what happens to you that God speaks… It’s in language that’s not always easy to decipher, but it’s there powerfully, memorably, unforgettably.”

I talked to a long-time friend and mentor who is an Episcopal priest and looked into things and sat and prayed on it, and then let it go when another Washington, DC, job working for the Coast Guard presented itself. I simply couldn’t imagine what life would look like or what would have to happen to end up working for a church.

There is no way I can do justice to the events that have taken place or the unexpected cast of characters who have been a part of what has happened since. There have been so many unexpected and undeserved blessings, even while there has been confusion, frustration, and letting go. Looking with hindsight doesn’t show the heartbreak, missteps and mistakes, letting people down, the questions, or being lost in the woods for stretches. We each have to own our scars and those we cause others. And we each have to get up each day and ask and answer, “Now what?”

In his book, “The Heart of Christianity,” Marcus Borg talks about being what resurrection means in our lives:

“…the process of personal transformation at the center of the Christian life: to be born again involves death and resurrection. It means dying to an old way of being and being born into a new way of being, dying to an old identity and being born into a new identity–a way of being and an identity centered in the sacred, in spirit, in Christ, in God.”

There is so much there. So much to live into, live up to, and I don’t always to the best job of it. But trying to focus and center and find each day, something of a new life, centered in God and the sacred. That feels like what I have been trying to get to since I was a teenager and started uncovering pieces of life and the world that I love.

There is something new and at the same time, there are the parts and passions and wonders and curiosities that abide and make us who we are, each of us a piece of a larger puzzle. And how we see things and how we see ourselves, they are and we are. I have been reading John O’Donohue’s “Anam Cara,” which goes on my very short list of books I’d take with me anywhere.

“There is such an intimate connection between the way we look at things and what we actually discover. If you learn to look at yourself and your life in a gentle, creative, and adventurous way, you will be eternally surprised at what you find… Each of us needs to learn the unique language of our own soul. In that distinctive language, we will discover a lens of thought to brighten and illuminate our inner world.”

“Anam Cara” shows how creatively and actively our inner world, our bodies, and the landscapes around us are all sacred and interconnected.

Each of the last five or six years, I have picked myself up a pair of shoes and a book for my birthday. Sometimes they have been trail running shoes, sometimes running shoes, Sanuks, or Vans. The books are more varied and tangential than I could even account for. The purpose is to invite in new adventures for the year: physical adventures on foot as well as intellectual adventures. Both make for adventures of the soul. This year it is trail shoes and Huston Smith’s autobiography, “Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine.”

Who knows what adventures year number 46 holds? I’ve learned I don’t know much. But I’m trying to get better as I go on about listening to my life and to hearing God speak. I am trying to use life up to this point, scars and all, to invite transformation and embrace new life ahead, centered in the sacred, centered in Christ, centered in God.

And I find life is generally better when I remember to get outside, with the dog 🙂

 

 

 

Matthew and the Rock Face

If you’d told me 15 years ago that I would find laughter, joy, friendships, tears, questions, answers, life, sorrow, challenges, confusion, exhaustion, and exhilaration, all in a Bible study, I am sure I would have dismissed it.

At the beginning of October 2017, two groups at Christ Church Easton started a journey through Matthew’s gospel, using N.T. Wright’s “Matthew for Everyone” as a touchstone. We weren’t sure whether to end at Christmas, part-way down the path, but both groups wanted to see it through. With three weeks left to go, Jesus has been arrested, and we know what’s coming.

Wright looks at where we are in the story and compares it to standing at the bottom of a huge rock face.

“That is how we should feel as we stand at the foot of the final ascent of St. Matthew’s gospel. We have walked at a steady pace through the hills and the valleys of the story. We have sat down to hear Jesus deliver another parable or discourse. We have marched with him along the road, enjoying the sunshine of the early days in Galilee, and the remarkable views as the disciples gradually realized more of what the kingdom was about. We have arrived in Jerusalem at watched dramatic events unfold. But we are now standing in front of a sheer wall of rock, and if we don’t find it both compelling and terrifying, we haven’t got the right spectacles on.”

I feel that. I feel it in my life and I feel it as we read and work through Matthew. I feel it as we approach both spring and Easter. With all the beauty and questions, there is death ahead. There is rebirth and renewal after, but it only comes after and because of a death. I think that is also true of our lives. It is of mine–some of the most beautiful and meaningful times come after loss, come after the low, come after the crap. And sometimes they only happen because of the painful experience that preceded it.

Wright goes on:

“The theories about why Jesus died–theories of the ‘atonement,’ as they are called–are like maps or old photographs, taken from a distance. They may be accurate in their way, and the’re helpful particularly when it’s cloudy and you can’t see too much for the moment. But they’re not the same thing as climbing to the top yourself, and perhaps, if you’re lucky, getting there on a clear day when you can see the view. When that happens, you will find you quickly run out of words to describe what you are looking at.”

It’s not the same thing as climbing to the top yourself. What we find in Scripture is a lot like what we find in life–we get out of it what we invest in it, what we live into it. And if we are going to understand Scripture, or life, it is going to help to have guides, and friends to share the journey with, and the views. We are going to stumble and we are going to need help.

We’ve got three classes left, finishing this ascent during Holy Week as we head into Easter. Our two groups of pilgrims are at the rock face. A journey that started together five months ago. When I look back, when I look around, and when I look forward, I “quickly run out of words to describe” it.

Distractions and Renewal

Stuff gets in the way. Stuff gets in the way of life happening the way it is supposed to. We get distracted, we lose focus, and before we know it, our lives have veered from where we thought they were supposed to go.

Maybe that’s where Lent comes in. As a season, it asks us to let go of some of those distractions. To let go of those things that keep us from living life as we were meant to live it. When people pick a trivial thing, even a happy thing, to give up for Lent, I think maybe it misses the mark.

I like the notion of Lent as a time for renewal and refocusing. Last week at Christ Church Easton, the Gospel reading was Mark’s account of Jesus’ transfiguration on the mountain. Interim pastor Jerrett Hansen, reflecting on this mountaintop experience, asked, “How are we connected to the story?”

He posited we need to live into the mystery of the story, the mystery of God and Christ, rather than try to intellectually analyze it.

“Jesus and God are to be experienced. We need to be open to these experiences… Experiencing God is essential to our journey.”

I think that is what life’s distractions prevent us from doing. They get in the way of our wonder; they get in the way of loving more fully; they get in the way of opening ourselves to possibilities and to each other. Distractions keep us from knowing ourselves more fully and from knowing God more fully.

Maybe instead of giving something up just to give something up, for Lent we can think about getting ourselves into spiritual shape. Building better habits to peel back the distractions. Jerrett introduced a notion that a friend of his, Michael Foss, spelled out as marks of discipleship:

1. Pray daily
2. Worship weekly
3. Read the Bible daily
4. Build spiritual friendships
5. Serve in the community
6. Be generous in all things

We’ll be spending time over the next weeks working through what some of those look like and what they mean. If you are up for it, maybe think of Lent as time to take on a discipline, or a devotional habit, to help get into shape a bit.

We all need help in our lives in some form or fashion. We can all be better people, for ourselves, our family, our friends, our community, our world.

I’m stoked to be helping lead groups this Lent and spring, which will be looking at Mark’s Gospel; which will be looking at how and why to pray and read the Bible. And the Alpha Course.

I love Mother Teresa’s notion that through prayer God guides us to do the things that need to be done in the world, that “prayer changes us and we change things.”

God invites us to come as we are, just as we are. But He also knows we are capable of being so much more. We can be better. We can do better. Maybe we can start now.

I’ll leave with a final though from Jerrett’s sermon this past Saturrday:

“God loves you the way you are, but He knows how much more you can be.”

On Vocation Part II: Closer to the Heart

My path seems spiral-shaped sometimes. I come back to a familiar place or thought, but things are different. It’s like further unearthing something, brushing dirt away to reveal more of the picture or map.

When I graduated Washington College in 1998, I was set to go to graduate school with the goal of teaching philosophy and religion. Ultimately graduate school debt didn’t make sense and there was something to staying in this community that stuck. That fall I started working at the Academy Art Museum, overseeing public relations, marketing, and development. Almost 20 years later, my career and spiritual paths combine, right across the street from the Academy: on October 16, I will start working full-time at Christ Church Easton as Assistant for Adult Christian Education & Newcomers Ministry.

I’ve been working at Christ Church part-time since last November, listening to a calling to work with small groups and adult education. I go back to Frederick Buechner’s thought that, “the place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” I knew right away that working with the church was the first time that my vocation lined up with the big questions that I’ve always asked, the things I wonder about, and how I want to spend my time.

I am humbled by and grateful for this opportunity. This summer I told friends that if I won the lottery, I’d focus more on working for the church, continuing my own education, and writing. This fall it seems I’ve won the lottery.

Since February 2015, I’ve had the privilege of being the Executive Director of the Oxford Community Center, in the town where I grew up. I don’t have the words to say how much that experience has meant to me and what an incredible time it has been developing programs and events and welcoming and building the community at OCC. It has given me back a town I had lost touch with and one I am excited to call home again.

There have been a few moments in my life where/when things have lined up and I have known in my heart and in my bones what I was supposed to do. To this point in my working life, I’ve had jobs that I’ve enjoyed, but not that called me from the deepest level. I’ve felt this calling time and time again–from studying and wanting to teach philosophy and religion; to wanting to go back to school for Christian theology in 2014; to last year, putting my hopes and intentions out into the world, which led me to the small groups position at Christ Church.

I’ve reached a place and time in life that feels like a new beginning. It’s a beginning that is the culmination of everything that’s happened up to this point: work, fatherhood, friendships, connections, questions, faith, joy, struggle, community, opportunity, study, passion, prayer.

In his book, “Desire,” John Eldredge spells out:

“To live life fully–that is to say, to live life as God meant for us to live–demands a full recovery of our heart. You need that wellspring flowing swift and clear and true… The adventure calls. The future awaits. How you handle your heart’s desire will in great measure determine what becomes of your life.”

To be a part of a community of faith. To help each other in our own walks, with our own questions. To study, to learn, to share, to write. To have the opportunity to follow a calling in vocation. To live life closer to the heart. To listen, to discern God’s will and find deep happiness in His Way and Word.

Those are things that get me out of bed in the morning, things that stir my heart watching the sunrise. They are thoughts and images that dance through my mind when I am running, skateboarding, hiking, reading, or paddleboarding.

It’s a coming together of life and experience to this point, my part and passion in God’s larger work and will. It’s coming to know God’s grace and love as lived out and given to and for us through Jesus Christ.

Here I am. I am grateful, humbled, excited, and so many other things.

Amen.