Resolution

I seriously failed in my attempt to keep writing regularly. I’ve kept meaning to come back, but like sending an email to a friend, I feel that it has to be just right in order to post it, and nothing has been just right to post. Well, there’s nothing like New Year’s to inspire changed behavior, so I’m back.

 

A lot has happened. I’ve been dating someone for a little more than 3 months. I am finally no longer working for the corporation I was working for (victim of yet another force reduction – but fortunately one of the last to receive a generous severance package). I spent much of the fall meeting and traveling as I serve on my parish’s search committee. Life has been busy, and a bit intense. Among it all, I’ve taken regrettably little time to sit and reflect on what it all means.

Obviously losing my job has had the most intense immediate impact. But I am glad to be gone. It had become an unpleasant place to be and several friends commented that they had sensed for months that I was unhappy with work. Now, I really am fully reinventing myself, in the middle of my life! I think I’ve settled on a course of action, though I’m still mulling it about. I think I’m going to follow my college desire and go back to school to certify to teach. High school science. Teaching/training was the one part of my old job that I always loved and the one skill that almost everyone I know affirms in me. So I think that following a heartfelt, deep desire is what’s called for!

 

I’ve been reading Anne Lamott’s “Grace (Eventually)” which I received as a Christmas gift. What a great title! It certainly sums up much of my life experience. In any event, she ends one chapter saying that she hopes her gravestone says that she was a helper and that she danced. I think that sums up what Jesus has called us to do. The experience of love and the call to love impel us to serve others. To reach out and give that love to all around us, because only by giving the gift do we receive the gift.

But I also think that the experience of that love calls us to dance. To whirl about with abandon at times. At others to move in ways that are stately and ordered. But always to move in time to a beat which is not our own. It’s not a metaphor I instinctively like, as I have no sense of rhythm myself. And yet, like others who lack that ability, I long to dance. Seeing people dance can move me by their grace, their celebration. I hope that my life is lived like that. A sense of something calling me to follow and my own willingness to follow. And looking around to see that, in our own ways, we are all following that same music.

 

Maybe this is all the purpose I need. I wish I had that almost biblical sense of a vision, of a calling. That vivid dream or clear voice or angel scaring the bejeebers out of me and telling me what I should do.

Sometimes I think love is the only real miracle. That we can find ourselves able to love each other is amazing. Definitely miraculous. So while I would like God to tell me what to do, and telling me how would be a greatly appreciated bonus, I don’t think it really happens like that. I think that what I do get is to look around and experience this miracle of love and to join in the dance. To help and to dance. Maybe I’ll do that by teaching. Maybe not. But, God help me, I plan to help and to dance.