Here

One of the great challenges and joys of my life has been learning to find and cultivate meaning in all of the spaces I find myself in. I’m a bit of a dreamer, so it isn’t very easy for me to stay rooted in the moment. I don’t actually think it comes all that naturally to any of us. In our churches, in our work, in our lives, it’s always “what’s next?” It is so easy to believe a false narrative— that we will feel fulfilled, that we will be connected to a deep sense of vocation, that we will really be doing the work of God— when we hit a certain benchmark. There is nothing wrong with having a plan, or hoping to experience growth or transformation. Hope for the future isn’t a bad thing. But it can be limiting, especially since we often find that when the future arrives, it doesn’t feel all that different from what we just left. The horizon has simply moved. There’s a new “there” to reach. 

I have certainly experienced this for most of my vocational life. I kept feeling as if I’d turn a corner into “real” adulthood, into “real” pastoral ministry, and then everything would be different. But instead, I kept finding myself in one long in between. Vocation, life, and adulthood continued to look more varied, more nuanced, and much stranger than I thought it would. I remember vividly meeting with my spiritual director while I was on retreat about a year after graduating with my Masters of Divinity. I told him how frustrated I was, how I couldn’t see the next step, how I felt like my vocation was being thwarted. That’s the word I used, “thwarted.” He very calmly, very thoughtfully proceeded to tell me I was wrong. “It is not your vocation that is being thwarted,” he said, “but your expectations.” He knew what it would take me years to grasp, that vocation is all around us, all the time. He knew that it was sometimes our own failure of imagination, our own inability to notice what is in front of us, that really limits us. He continued by giving me his advice on how to become a pastor. You simply start pastoring, he said, in any context you find yourself in, until someone calls you one. 

I really hated this advice. All of it. It made me angry, actually. But slowly, I began to realize how powerful it was. The vocational horizon kept moving, and kept moving, and I began to realize that there was only now. There was only here. My task was to look around me, at the reality of where I found myself, to find God there, and to discern how to partner with God in that space. Now, I find myself in a place where I embrace this approach to pastoring, and where I can see how deeply it suits me, how profoundly connects to who I am as a person and the work I feel called to do. Now, I am a pastor without a congregation. But it seems that, no matter what I’m doing, I can’t shake the role or the title. And not because I have a title. Not because I work in a church. Not because I am ordained. None of these things are currently true. Instead, I’m called a pastor because it is a deeply rooted part of what I do and who I am. 

I find snippets of my vocation popping up in the strangest of places, like spring flowers that have naturalized and spread, peaking up from lawns, and verges, and bits of dirt wedged in sidewalks. I find it in a conversation here, a prayer there, a blog post there. I never know quite when and where I will find it. It took an incredible shift for me to take my eyes off of the horizon, to let go of my concrete expectations for what vocation would look like for me, and to cultivate the vision to recognize how God was moving all around me. I have come, very slowly, to realize that so much of God’s heart is in helping us recognize reality. And the reality is that God is all around us, always at work, always inviting us to partnership, always encountering us with love. I love how Flannery O’Connor writes it: “God is feeding me and what I’m praying for is an appetite.” (A Prayer Journal, p.37) All I can do is pray that I continue to grow in my an appetite and awareness, so that I can partner with the goodness and provision that God is always offering me.