Fall Break Reflections

 

Warning: if this post makes as little sense to you as the Hebrew my Old Testament professor occasionally spouts in class, just know you have my full and ungrudging permission to hop on over to a more action-packed blog—just feeling reflective today! 

After an evening of sweet potatoes and Star Trek (we did eat other things too, no worries— I simply have an overactive penchant for alliteration), a friend of mine asked me just how exactly I was feeling about Candler now that we’ve made it half-way through our first semester.  Now, I am going to be honest here and say that I am frequently quite terrible at answering these sorts of questions on the fly.  More often than not, I’m the type of person that likes to turn these kinds of inquiries over in my head a good bit first, letting them roll around for a while until I’ve found the images, the phrasing, even the tone that fits just right.  While this habit has served me well at times, it can also leave me an inarticulate deer in the headlights, stuck groping for authenticity in the absence of pre-mediated answers.  And goodness knows, it’s moments like these that I need more of, moments that force me to wander beyond my “script,” so to speak, and that challenge me to dare to reach for new depths of the genuine and vulnerably share with others the messier, more inchoate spaces of my life. 

And sheesh, that got introspective fast, but anyways, the point was that, coming off of midterms last week and two lovely days of a restful fall break now, it’s been good to look back over the transition process of the past months.  The realization that we’re this far into the semester is both exhilarating and frightening.  Exhilarating because, in a lot of ways I feel that I’ve more or less found my stride here, at least for the moment, and I’m hopeful for the changes and challenges the coming years hold.  Frightening because, as someone who struggles with compulsively feeling the need to get “ahead” somehow, not to mention to measure up to my own ridiculous expectations, well, I guess there’s a lot of comfort in being able to say to myself, “It’s fine that you don’t have x, y, or z all figured out—after all, you just got here!”  Officially deprived of that excuse now, I’m challenged to remember the need to show grace to myself, to acknowledge my limits and lean instead on Christ’s sufficiency.  I’m shown yet again my unhealthy propensity to place greater stock in what I do than in what God has already done and is continuing to do for me, and it is here that I find again the call to ground my life in ever-greater gratitude.

One thing I’ve recently noticed about my program and my place within it is that, rather than the ordination and non-ordination tracks I’d initially been assuming, students here are much more likely to fall into the categories of theologian, activist/advocate, and scholar, with, of course, a whole lot of overlap and nuances between the three.  I realize that might seem like a silly (and yes, indeed, a vastly reductionist) observation, but for whatever reason it was really helpful for me to name.  See, drawn as I am in a variety of ways to each of these three roles, it also means that, more often than I’d care to admit, I find myself feeling as though I don’t actually fit as well as I “should” in any of them!  Which isn’t a bad thing, I don’t think, just one that can be discomfiting and one that forces me to call myself out when I’ve been unconsciously playing the comparison game with my peers…Looking back on the challenging transition period that followed my first stay in Senegal two years back, I know that I sometimes struggle when I find myself caught in these in-between spaces.  Feeling such deep sense of belonging both over there and here, I felt confused and frustrated by the fact that I could never be in both places at once, overlooking the immense blessing I’d been given in the form of this second family of mine.  And so, drawing from that experience at least, I do think a whole lot of good can happen from in-between spaces, long as I let go of the need to fit myself neatly into one spot or another and am instead simply open to being taught by friends and mentors on each of these different paths.

Somewhat unrelated, but we read an excerpt from Henri Nouwen in my Pastoral Care class, and all of it was so beautiful that, goodness, maybe I should have retyped it all here rather than plowing through these random speculations.  Too late for that, however, so I’ll just share a few sentences:

“When we are not afraid to enter into our own center and to concentrate on the stirrings of our own soul, we come to know that being alive means being loved.  This experience tells us that we can only love because we are born out of love, that we can only give because our life is a gift, and that we can only make others free because we are set free by Him whose heart is greater than ours…” (The Wounded Healer, 1972)

Gorgeous, right?  Though, as usual, far easier to agree with than to live out truly, but here’s to trying!

Hope this finds you well,
Janelle