Lyndsey Medford

justice + joy

Christian

Theology Girl Gets Churched

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I’ve made this admission in many times and places, but here it is again:

Over the last three or four years, my church attendance has been…sporadic, at best.

It’s been a long time now since I lost my church during seminary over the excommunication of a friend. After that, I sort of lost the will to live as a church person; I moved, traveled, and got married over the next couple of years; and I started actually looking forward to Sunday mornings—lazy breakfasts and beach trips.

Once I got out of the habit of going, I saw the churches I did visit through new eyes. It seemed that few congregations could have really answered the question—what are we doing here?

As a kid, I would’ve said that church is a place to learn about God and sing. But those are things I can do on my own, or in the car, or with my family.

Later church came to mean communion; but I got used to participating in that ritual without belonging to a particular organization.

And along the way, the words and actions of these church people around the country came to seem weirder and weirder, like I had accidentally stepped, uninitiated, into a clubhouse—and it was too often immediately apparent that I wouldn’t fit in as a member of the club. I cuss too much; Nate and I don’t wear boots and boat shoes; I don’t treat the right people with suspicion; I ask too many questions; I talk about Jesus too much; I’m not impressed by the right things.

Belonging to that club wasn’t exactly a compelling reason to give up my Sunday mornings.

After all this, I’m more aware than ever that our language can serve as a dividing line: if you know the code, you’re in. If church words make you groan, scratch your head, tune out, or panic—you’re out.

Even though that fact sometimes makes me want to start over from square zero—no church words allowed—I also realize that many of the words we flippantly use once had deep meaning for people. If we got rid of them, eventually we’d build up a whole new vocabulary to name the same experiences.

Now that I’m helping to start a church, what I really want to do is turn these words from dividing lines into meeting places. Maybe we can pull some things apart and find a way to recover the truth, the feeling, the richness hidden inside. Those who can’t stand to go to church and those who can’t imagine leaving it could both be surprised.

Like some others before me, I want to go word by word through my own journey as I navigate this whole returning-to-church thing. The (Un)Systematic Theology Project will shape and inform it all.

I had to start with my own job title. Hop over to the Two Rivers blog to poke at discipleship with me?

And tell me in the comments—what’s the worst church word? what’s your favorite word to describe God?

Dear friend: How Much is Enough?

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Dear Lyndsey,

How much is enough?

How much money is enough?
How much charitable work is enough?

How much family time is enough?

How many working hours is enough?

How much relaxation is enough?

And on…

It’s broad, I know.

Dear friend,

The short answer is: probably less than you think.

That’s not a popular message in my corner of the world. I am surrounded by various cults of productivity, self-improvement, biohacking, and hustle. I encounter hundreds of advertisements every day, all designed to convince me I need more stuff. And magazines and mommy wars claim that an optimized life includes a sparkling home with a subway-tile backsplash, two children with good grades who play sports and instruments, regular promotions, six-pack abs, and a pretend-naughty-but-actually-perfectly-respectable amount of wine.

These days I constantly ask the question you’re asking, and it’s always because I’m pursuing a worthy goal: a balanced life. I think that if I planned out my days, resources, and priorities correctly, I’d be able to give and do as much as possible while also leaving enough space to simply enjoy my life. At the outset, it feels like an easy matter of calculation. You’ll have it all together if you make enough money to pay for healthcare and go out to eat twice a month; only say “yes” to the volunteer commitments that actually sound fun; and do some creative accounting to move “attend your nephew’s soccer game” from the onerous family commitment bin to recreation.

I think your question reveals that you know it doesn’t actually work that way. No matter how many commitments and adjustments you make, things never go the way you planned them and you always wish you could have (or give) just a little more. You’re still behind at work and eating cereal for dinner. Still finite.

The thing is, a balanced life—a life where you are able to have enough and give enough—isn’t a tangram puzzle of master schedules and productivity hacks. It’s a life that fully embraces finitude.

There was a time when an overzealous reading of books like Radical and Crazy Love made me think that God regularly calls everyone to perform superhuman feats of faith just because He can. Of course, I can never do enough to solve world hunger or fix my friend’s PTSD. Of course, I would say to you—but for a long time, I refused to really believe it. I fell into the same trap as a lot of nonprofit organizations: I saw how much needed to be done, and I thought that was some kind of summons to try to do it all. And in the process, I demanded more of myself than I ever would have expected of anyone else. That’s where pride came in: I thought I was special, strong, or spiritual enough to take on whatever work, overwelm, and abuse the world threw at me without needing a break. I listened to the productivity experts, the volunteer pleas, the charity commercials, the guilt sermons from resentful and jaded “servants,” and tried to best all of their demands. In the end, I became special in the sense that I was especially exhausted and unable to be of use to anyone.

There may be a time or two in most of our lives when our calling really is too big for us, and only God can get us through; but just because those can be times of great spiritual growth doesn’t mean we’re supposed to go around seeking out crises and crusades and grinding material poverty. And if God wants you to become Mother Teresa, God’s not going to hide it from you—God’s going to speak to you audibly like She did to her. For me, embracing finitude means I’ve had to learn to be content with just the little tiny piece that I can do. Far more than when I drag around too many burdens with a somber look on my face, I help the world when I do my small part with excellence, gladness, and faith that God will complete the work.

Here’s another way to put it: embracing a life of less teaches us to believe in true abundance. When we pare down our budgets, we find ourselves enjoying simple pleasures and creative pursuits—and delighting that much more in the indulgences we do have. When I stopped volunteering so much, I had more time to learn from other people and therefore improve the work I did—and I became overwhelmed with gratitude for all the good work others were doing in the world. When I obsess less about the number of hours I need for work and play, and instead focus on doing them both with wholeheartedness, I find I am better able to hear my body, spirit, or family say enough.

Enough is the amount that leaves some margin in your life: money for an impromptu dinner party or gift; time for a neighbor’s crisis or for just daydreaming. Margin is peace of mind. Margin is grace for yourself and others.

Enough is different for everyone. Just because Instagram Ingrid has a six-figure job and a Paleo meal on the table every night doesn’t mean you have to live up to her standards. God is wildly creative; God may have Instagram Ingrid right where she needs to be. But even if your enough turns out to be objectively less than hers doesn’t mean you are less than her.

In Luke 10, Jesus says that one thing is enough: to spend time with him and hear his voice. Everything else can be held loosely; nothing else adds to who we are. It is enough to be a child of God. It is enough to ask Spirit for help, and then do our best. It is enough not to take ourselves so seriously. It is enough to be content.

When in doubt, dear friend, don’t ask whether you should give, do, or have more; ask whether the thing you’re adding helps you be more present and more yourself with the work, the people, the time you’ve been given. Don’t be afraid to be small. Don’t be afraid to believe there is abundance beyond you.

Hoping that is enough,
Lyndsey

For We Are All One Body: on healthcare

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Is it my sixth? My seventh visit to this doctor in nine months? I wish they didn’t make you sit in a high chair to draw your blood, I think, rummaging through my purse for something, anything, to fidget with. I gulp cold water from a paper cup and smile at the other people in the room as if to calm them down. They are never as worried as I am; my body has a mild phobia of needles, my blood pressure sometimes dropping until jagged stars invade my vision and the world goes black. Today, my heart has already been racing and my head light for a while, since my doctor told me we have exhausted our options in pill form and she is prescribing a weekly injection. This is good, maybe this will be the one that helps, my brain says. My body is gearing up to reject these future weekly invaders.

“Would you mind loosening this band? I’ve passed out before,” I ask the phlebotomist, trying to sound nonchalant.

“It’s a tourniquet. It’s going to be tight,” she snips as she relieves the pressure choking my arm.

It’s about the rudest thing that’s happened to me since I left Boston, but I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. Even when your doctor is kind and patient, she conveys through her busyness, her degrees on the wall, her brusque responses when you venture an idea, that you as a patient should sit down and shut up. When it comes to managing your health, you are viewed more as a liability (prone to eat too many cookies or forget your meds) than as a partner; your familiarity with your own body, ability to read and research, and willingness to make lifestyle changes do not count for much at all.

The bloodwork goes smoothly despite my insistence on retaining consciousness. “We will get to work on your prior authorization with the insurance,” the doctor tells me on the way out the door. The injections are so expensive she will have to make a special plea on my behalf.

Two weeks later, I get a phone call: the insurance company will pay for the drug, the pharmacy says. My copay will be $200 a week, but the drug company might bring it down if I call them. I thank the lady and hang up. It’s been my best two weeks, physically, in the last nine months; at the urging of several friends, I’ve been taking turmeric. It costs five cents a day.

Even when we pretend to be objective about healthcare, the word means different things to all of us. My own feelings about doctors. His memories of the time he nearly died. Her mother, in the best nursing home they can afford. His kids receiving the mental health treatment, disability help, or asthma meds that help them function in an inhospitable society. Her brother trying to get clean again.

The last time the country debated healthcare, I was 19, my chronic illness was in remission and I’d never paid for a doctor’s visit; so “healthcare” was a bit of an abstraction to me. But I remember many conversations about all aspects of the healthcare system: we were concerned with the reasons healthcare was so expensive.

This time around, I hear only about who’s going to pay. It almost sounds as if lawmakers believe, if they get the right actuaries and accountants into the same room, some way exists to balance costs and benefits so most everyone will end up happy. But most of us know that’s not really true. And it is the vulnerable, the cash-strapped and the caregivers, who are losing sleep waiting for the verdict: will their families be counted among the “deserving?”

This time around, as families find themselves feeling powerless, I have been reminded at every turn how the healthcare system itself disempowers people. How patients are run through systems like widgets on an assembly line. How your doctor, your insurance company, and countless bureaucrats in between decide whether you receive treatment. How one’s various doctors and specialists make it difficult to share records, information, and ideas between them.

I am disturbed that we don’t, properly speaking, participate in “healthcare”; we have a system for disease-care, organ-care, but not for helping people lead good and happy lives. It is hardly acknowledged amidst the sterile walls and medical machines that our organs are connected to one another,  let alone that the mental, emotional, and social spheres can impact our bodies as heavily as drugs.

I am frustrated that I have the option of trying dietary solutions to my own health problems only because I run in well-educated circles—that even though these options pose zero risk (unlike immune-suppressing injections), they do not merit mention by my doctor.

I am convinced we are not asking enough questions; for even if we found some way to pay for it all, our healthcare still would not be healthy, or holistic, or just.

There are philosophers who say that everything Americans do, we do to avoid thinking about death. Whether or not they are correct, most of us could agree that we are avoiding some hard conversations. For so long we have believed we could outsource the burden of considering these topics: the doctor manages our health, the Congress, our obligations to our neighbors, while the pastor answers moral questions and knows what to do when someone dies.

Some people in the gut-health and autoimmune-management communities (industries?) speak of a patient-led revolution: putting the parts of the body back together and empowering people to manage their health through their own decisions, relying less on drugs and more on lifestyle choices whose side effects are only good.

I hope that as we are re-examining healthcare, making our phone calls to Congress and our judgments of other political positions, we will notice that the experts are not the only ones who can make change in every aspect of our medical lives.

We can discuss end-of-life with our families to avoid unnecessary medical bills and mental anguish.
We can improve lonely seniors’ health outcomes by spending time with them.
We can pay more attention to how our diets make us feel.
We can share information with friends and neighbors and help people research their conditions.
We can redirect future tax savings to support programs that offer free medical or mental health care, make healthy eating and exercise more accessible, or treat drug addiction.
We can face questions like how to deal with pain and when to pull the plug in our churches and community centers.

We can thank science for its meticulous dissection of creation—while also recognizing that the mysteries of life lie beyond the reaches of repeatable experiments and double-blind trials. We can honor the gifts medicine brings—while calling out the ways the industry has concentrated money and power with a few.

We will help someone else to be healthier, because we know that our own health cannot be disentangled from theirs, any more than the trees of the forest could pull out their own roots’ from the others’, any more than the eye can say to the hand, I don’t need you. We, too, will be the ones who give care.

How to fail at social media

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Yesterday I had an idea, and I wrote a blog post. It took me many hours. When I finished it, I thought, this is weird and cheesy. But this morning, I gave it some edits and decided I needed to get on with my life. I took a calculated risk. I published it.

Two hours later, no one had liked it and A PERSON HAD UNFOLLOWED ME on Facebook. I am not exaggerating. A PERSON. HAD. UNFOLLOWED ME.

I continue to not-exaggerate when I tell you that I considered quitting everything. I could go back to dashing things off every few months when the spirit seizes me. I prayed a sad prayer about whether I should give up my professional-writing dreams and just be content brightening one person’s day, every once in a while, like I used to do.

And God was like, uh, no. Get a grip.

So I did some chores so I could think.

Had I ruined my blog by publishing a weird, cheesy post? Of course not. I’m damn proud of my blog. And someone, somewhere will like my little story. But it felt like I had failed in some really important way. Maybe I’m a little too used to people telling me how great my writing is. Maybe in a year of transition, of identity shift, I’ve staked a little too much on all those compliments. Maybe this is a tiny, tiny dose of that humility I, you know, prayed for earlier this week.

But even if I had actually failed, even if everyone stopped pity-following me, even if I never publish a book—wouldn’t that sort of be the definition of “calculated risk?” You might fail. Actually, if you practice a craft, you will fail. That is part of the whole thing. If you want to never fail, Being A Creative should be last on your list.

Here is another thing. I am an unfollower. It’s my phone and I only let a few things on it and I unfollow people every day. So if my thoughtless click caused this reaction in someone else? I would be super annoyed. DON’T PUT THAT ON ME, I would think. Your happiness, neurotic stranger, is 100% not my responsibility.

I’ve been thinking every day for the past few weeks about what it means to serve as a writer, as someone who has to try to make a living by trying to become a public speaker. What can I give? How can I help? But today it hit me that as long as I’m fixated on likes, hearts, and thumbs-ups, I’ll always be taking more than I give. I’ll always be operating out of fear. I’ll always be trying to reflect some audience back at itself instead of offering something unique—and maybe even giving someone else permission to be weird and cheesy.

It’s a weird way to relate to ourselves: by broadcasting things. It used to scare me to death; our devices and apps weren’t designed to make us better people. But I’m finally seeing hope. We don’t have to do what the devices and apps tell us: check them constantly, obsess over our stats, build our lives around our feeds. We just have to be good people, which has honestly never been easy. Or safe. Or un-cheesy.

But it’s worth it.

Likes and ♥♥♥,

Lyndsey

Where were you on the night he was betrayed?

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I am not at all convinced that I won’t become Catholic or Orthodox someday. I love the Great Feast of Eucharist; the sense of tradition that connects us to so many places and times; the seasons, feasts, and fasts that we Episcopals are a bit lax about keeping. But if I do stay Anglican, it will be because Communion was enough. I need—I believe we all need—faith to come to us in bread and wine.

Because I love Eucharist so, much of the more terrible church-related pain in my life has been Communion-related: people denying one another Eucharist for reasons I saw as unfair. But through these great hurts, because I love Eucharist so, I understood, too: not the desire to become a gatekeeper, exactly, but to protect something sacred from a flippant and entitled world.

In my first year after college, I worked for a beautiful and holy and love-dealing church who taught me very much by being Christ to me, My main complaint was that this church did not have Communion near often enough, and when they did there was something I found disturbing. The ten or so kids in the congregation went zooming around the church whenever any activity took place, which was fine, except that it was the same during Communion—and they would sort of rip off hunks of bread as they passed by. They seemed to have no sense at all that this was special bread, and something inside me felt a physical jab whenever a piece was hacked off, crumbs flying. I wanted them to care about Jesus’s body. I think there is much to be gained by receiving something as a gift, in both hands; by learning solemnity.

I think of those kids when we have debates about who can be a part of church. It seems keeping people out often comes with good intentions, the desire to do things “decently and in order.” And even when you understand why people want to invoke grace, you also want to protest—in one sense, I know that it is silly to believe the attitude, knowledge, holiness with which I approach the Lord’s table each week is so very much greater than those kids’. Still, that seems like no reason to do nothing. Shouldn’t the church at least try to offer our best when we obey Jesus’ commandment to remember him?

Remember me, Jesus would whisper when those kids made me anxious. It is a gift. It was a gift even on that night when he was betrayed, offered to the clueless, the halfhearted, the sleepy, the deniers and the betrayer. He did not say take a decorous amount and eat, only Take, eat; this is my body. Did one of them giggle at the strangeness of these words, the nervousness of hearing him insist he would soon die? Did the servants, perhaps, gather up the remnants like the unbaptized do after Orthodox service—and was it not life to them as well?

When I remember Jesus, I am compelled to take this bread with fear and trembling; and whatever children are in my charge will be taught to do the same. But when we remember Jesus, we are also steered firmly into the grace business, into giving even when giving is indecorous. On the night when he was betrayed, Jesus said, over and over, keep my commands and my command is this: that you love one another. And he washed feet. And he did not want to be honored or protected.

So  when it comes to impertinent children, sinners and doubters and outsiders, I am hard pressed to say we should not err on the side of take and eat. If it makes us wince to have our sense of ceremony violated; even if we want to cry don’t do it! when the chief of sinners reaches out to touch his body, let us not take up swords of defense but instead go with that offender a second mile. Let us take hands, ask questions, and find in the end that (of course) the chief of sinners is us. We do not remember Jesus best by limiting our tables; we meet the humble Lord every time he is broken and shared again. Here is a debt that cannot be repaid by respectability, but might be honored by scandal. Here is Eucharist: given to us in our unworthiness, reawakening us to thanksgiving.

fasting is not a Whole30

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I was grateful for Communion last night because I was painfully hungry. This is not a metaphor. Accidentally failing to eat enough for supper yesterday is about the closest I will get to fasting for a while because of some meds I’m on. It is, I admit, a relief, but it would also be easy. Traditional. Comforting, in a way, if I were able—not to “choose a fast”—just to not eat sometimes for Lent.

I rarely come to Lent knowing how I should move through this season. Perhaps the main reason is that repentance and self-examination are the things I do best, by which I mean my inner life generally fluctuates on some scale between self-criticism and self-improvement until God is shaking me by the shoulders going SNAP OUT OF IT! Usually, as everyone around me is talking about mindfulness and tough love, I’m feeling a sneaking suspicion that I’m supposed to repent of navel-gazing.

For a long time I loved Lent for precisely this reason, that it appeals to my natural religious instincts. If you’re Protestant, it generally goes something like this: someone asks you what you’re giving up for Lent, and then you feel guilty that you didn’t remember it was coming up. Then you muse about for a few days asking yourself what you should be doing better at. You don’t ask anyone else, and if you’re like me you sort of halfheartedly pray about it while continuing to stick this semi-imaginary burden squarely on your own shoulders. After perhaps wondering for a while how much, exactly, God cares about your extra ten pounds, you settle on giving up something you’ll miss, but which won’t disrupt your life too much.

Of course, being a religious overachiever, I got tired of that and decided to Do a Hard Thing a few years ago. I ate only fruits, vegetables, rice, and beans, and bought food for my food pantry with the money I saved. I don’t know if that sounds really noble and intense, but it wasn’t that hard; I would console myself, not with prayer and worship, but with thoughts of how many calories I was saving. I never really prayed for the world’s poor all that much, either. I was disappointed. I’d Done The Thing, but God hadn’t Changed My Life in return.

The gospel of self-improvement can function in much more subtle ways than we expect. Let me be clear that I am still operating this way when I say that the way white Protestants do Lent is often more reflective of upper-middle-class white culture than it is of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We love 30-day challenges, don’t we? Self-improvement is so much a part of our culture that we readily map those concepts onto Lent. Then we’re simultaneously happy to have “earned” an extra-big slice of cake at the end of the forty days—and, eventually, frustrated that our fast once again didn’t seem to have much to do with Easter.

Some of my friends are Orthodox. They fast from dawn until the end of the service every Sunday. They fast full days several times a year. And for Lent, they are encouraged to do without meat, fish, eggs, dairy, oil, or alcohol. Maybe that sounds like setting yourself up for failure; I think maybe that’s the point. When everyone in the community participates in the same fast, failure and success take on new meanings. Your spiritual practice is no longer about you and your “growth”; it’s about the life of the community and the work of God.

Maybe by next Lent I will have such a community. For now I have only conviction: to fast in a way that is not about me. To learn to lean on God. Success or failure will not be keeping my rule with perfection, or making some kind of personal breakthrough. To succeed is to disrupt my seamless rhythms enough to remember how to look for God breaking through the newfound cracks.

This winter has been, in some big ways, a season of loss for me, and so for Lent I’m taking on a couple of new practices. At the service yesterday, though, my mind raced with those old thoughts—shouldn’t I give something up? how can I call this a fast? have I repented enough today? And then came the Psalm.

O Lord, open my lips,
    and my mouth will declare your praise.
For you have no delight in sacrifice;
    if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased.
The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;
    a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

As the priest prayed that God would enable us to serve him in peace of mind, I did not wonder whether I deserved any such thing. I made off with that blessing and carried on with things because what I deserve is ashes and dust; but what God gives is bread and wine and blessing and grace.

May your fast, whatever it is, convince you only of abundance.

The Call of God

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My Vocation
by Lyndsey Graves

Can we talk about this word “vocation” for a hot second? Why we keep saying “vocation” when we mean “career”? We take the word “calling from God” and apply it to our aspirations for paid employment. How small of us. It’s just like when you meet someone at a party and you ask them what they “do”. We ask young people about their vocation so we can spiritualize our curiosity about what they’re going to “do”. I’ve been pursuing higher education for six years now, and for six years people have been pestering me about my vocation.

Well, one of my vocations is to be a student. I am a damn good student. If I were not reading and writing in some capacity, I’d be wasting my time on this earth. When I took a year and worked at a food pantry, reading and writing still called to me from deep inside. I work hard at school because God made me a thinker; I am smack in the middle of my vocation. I’m not waiting for it.

I have lots of other vocations, too, things God has me doing now and things that beckon from the future. I share love with a good-hearted man from New York state. I give money to my local church. I make food for my housemates and I clutch a phone in laughter and in prayer for friends states away. I visit my family in Georgia as much as possible. I’m supposed to talk to my priest about the way our church can love gay people, but I’m too scared. And in the future, I’m hoping to live in the South. I plan to be a gardener. I will be a person of hospitality and open my home to others as often as possible. I will count as friends those who are different from me. I will care for my friends more than for comfort and love my family more than career-pride. This is the calling of God on my life.

What I do for money is cater gourmet events at Boston museums. Is that my vocation? No. It’s a way to get money, and it would sicken me to try and spiritualize it, for all the people we get drunk and all the food we throw away. It’s not the vocation of anyone else who works there either, but it’s some people’s lifelong career. Not everyone gets to sit around and speculate about what very special job fits their very special self. Some people just have to make money.

What we do all share is a vocation to personhood, to the fulfillment of that full humanity that is so betrayed by our sin, our determination to stay small and selfish. That is the vocation I have pursued in seminary, and that has, indeed, changed and grown. I have learned how many ways there are to abandon this world for the love of God, and I have followed God ever-deeper into God’s love for the world. I have lost the taste for ready-made food and plastic celebrations; I’ve dug my fingers into the promises of fresh cilantro and the old-fashioned happiness of tea and candlelight. I’ve lost the knack of excusing injustice and claiming it’s not my fault; yet I’ve left behind the self-righteousness of thinking I alone could put it right again. I’ve continued the long trek of holiness we’ve all been wandering since kindergarten, those days when tasks like sharing and being nice and helping people and cleaning up after myself have seemed just as insurmountable as they ever were.

I’ve forgotten to pray and remembered again; I’ve deliberately run from God and then collapsed into her arms again, where she was patiently following me all along. This is all there is to do as humans in our hundred years – to be, people, with God, to learn love by doing the brave right thing, to put down the save-the-world schemes we’ve constructed out of pipe cleaners and pray every once in a while that we can love somebody today. It is a way of being, not a career goal, that determines whether we’re fulfilling our duty and our identity as God’s beloved. It is my vocation, in the end, to be generous and love the surprise of letting go, to be humble and love laughter, to be understanding and love the hearts of others under all their unloveable fears and failures and spikes.

Shall I betray all these whispering nudges of the Holy Spirit by throwing the rich words of my faith to a world that calls me only to produce and consume?

If you would like to know my dearest hopes for making a living and spending the bulk of my days, I will tell you that I want to be a professor of theology for undergraduates, and a writer of practical theology for anyone. I want to help others know and love God with their minds. My heart beats fuller when I watch others learn, and it sings when I write. I have learned this semester that the students I want so much to care for will frustrate, ignore, and disrespect me at times. But I have seen them get it, too, seen them assimilate new skills and formulate new thoughts and ask God new questions. That has been an amazing experience.

If I make it in the competitive professor profession, I will know this is the very special job for me. I certainly plan to continue doing my best to get there. But if I don’t make it, I’ll trust that there’s some other place I’m meant to make time for writing, teach and learn with others, invite them into my home, help us all figure out how to be. These are the gifts that call me out of myself. These are the activities I’m meant to prioritize. These are my vocations.