Lost and Found

 

So, I took this picture because lately I have truly been losing my marbles.  Ok, so not literally—as you can see my marble collection is still going strong!  However, I have been misplacing things this week at quite an extraordinary rate!  For example, in one day alone I lost my purse (found, thank goodness, on a couch I barely remembered sitting on); I lost my keys (which may or may not have turned up in my refrigerator, but let’s not even go there!); and then, returning home that night after a loooong day, discovered that I had also managed to lose the key to my apartment.  After 45 minutes of unproductive flashlight-hunting outside, I called my parents in sheer frustration, who (quite wisely and tactfully) pointed out that it really might make more sense to continue my search come daylight.  Being, at this point, in a rather dramatic mood, I heaved a giant sigh and plopped down right smack in the middle of the leaf-strewn parking lot to signal my defeat.  And, lo and behold, there was my key— only 2 inches away from where I had randomly sprawled out!  Now, I know there’s been a lot of pushback against diminishing the meaning of the word “miracle” by applying it to all sorts of trivial things, and I completely get that, but, suffice it say, statistically speaking that just shouldn’t have happened!

This week I’ve experienced moments of real “lost-ness” on a more metaphorical level as well.  Perhaps more so than I expected, I’ve been struggling recently with thinking through just exactly who I am/ what my role or even purpose is, this far removed from the Rhodes College and Memphis communities in which my identity was, in so many ways, clearly defined.  Reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s book, An Altar in the World, for my Pastoral Care class, I ran full-force into a quote that crystallized the sense of displacement I’d been feeling recently, as she exhorts readers to “press beyond being good to being good for something” (120).  Now, that might not strike a chord with anyone else, but for me, sheesh, that was rough stuff.  Because, in more ways than I care to admit, I think I still place a high priority on being good.  In fact, I can be quite good, excellent even, at being good!  But being good for something?  Well, that’s another matter entirely and something I haven’t figured out in the slightest!

At the same time, I’ve also recently had some delicious moments of feeling “found.”  One of those moments came in an unexpected venue— a “Vocational Discernment Seminar” for non-Methodists that, let’s be real, I attended solely because it was a pain-free way to knock out one of our first-year advising requirements.  About half-way through the seminar, the professor leading it offhandedly said something along the lines of, “After this program, you may very well go do other—sometimes very other—things.  But in the eyes of the world, you will be seen as a minister because, hey, you’ll be credentialed to be one!”  As someone emphatically not on the ordination track (that is, not today, at least), you’d think that comment might have made me squirm.  Instead, however, the idea swirled around in my mind for a moment before spiraling down and settling softly somewhere right in my very center, whispering in a way, “yes, this feels right.”  (Weird, I know!) 

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are definitely moments in my Old Testament class when I utterly fail to find connections between real life and, say, the study of toledat genealogical structures.  And certainly there are many topics in my History of the Early Church class that, though often mildly interesting, just don’t quite get my heart stirring and mind racing!  But I’m ok with that.  Because, truth be told, I do at some level still enjoy them, and even more significantly, do feel as though I’m learning things that I want and need to know in classes like Health as Social Justice, Skills in Conflict Transformation, and Pastoral Care.  These past few days, I have been feeling more and more that here is a place where imagination, collaboration, communication, and passion can be developed and stretched, and that, surely, is not such a bad place to be.

So I guess that’s ultimately why I went with the lost and found theme for today: in literal and figurative ways, there are many parts of me that are pretty dadgum lost.  But there are also bits and pieces that are found, or are in the process of being found.  And, while this in-between stage can at times be most uncomfortable, I’m coming to find that it can also be growing, revealing, good.

Hoping to have lost slightly less things next time we meet—

Truly,

Janelle