Teaching at my church tonight. It’s been a long, weird road but I wound up believing in the same gospel that brought me here.
On this day seven years ago, I started a hashtag on Instagram. I posted about it every day for the entire month of November. I asked everyone I knew to talk about it, too. It felt silly but necessary, to explore the who and what and how and what if behind all of those thankful lists I often read and scrolled through and even wrote myself this time of year. Seven years later, #getaftergrateful has over 90,000 posts on Instagram. I’m no longer in the mix, tagging and talking about tenacity and thankfulness. I’m so far removed from that world, in fact, that I forgot about it until an old friend texted me today. Looks like the pebble that fell from my heart and into the internet all of those years ago caused a ripple that met me all over again. I needed that.
Tonight, I got to take my preteen daughters to their first women’s ministry event at my church. The speaker shared about the need for community, and about being encouraged by a book written by an old friend of mine, and all of the worlds I’ve ever known collided at once. I’m teaching at this event next month and I don’t know how I’m gonna get through it with my girls in the audience. Following Jesus is the hardest and sweetest adventure.
I think about this post a lot.
Mostly because the thawing happens to me every few years. I’m there now, in fact.
The human condition is a wild, cyclical experience.
A historic hurricane slams into my old state days after a historic typhoon rages against my new one. In neither case am I directly affected, except for the matter of care — for earth that we have tried our best to destroy and disregard, for my friends in both places who are impacted, and for the strangers there who mean much to someone and to God.
It’s been more than a year since I embarked on a journey to sort out my faith from the one of those around me. Despite my best attempts, I cannot seem to shake the character of God, nor the life of Jesus, nor the sentiment that many people I meet seem to claim both and understand neither.
Tomorrow, I will go into work and care for dozens of elders on my day off because there is no one else to do it. I will work as a nurse’s aide for twelve hours straight and get paid for zero of them. I will drive past several churches, where coworkers sit and abstain from working on Sundays because it goes against their religious beliefs. The character of God and the life of Jesus tell me that the nursing home on a Sunday morning is as close to worship as I can possibly get.
This is not a brag. Matthew 7:20 warns that we are known by our fruit, and mine is often rotten. It’s been a long year of soul-searching; I acknowledge that I am not out of the bitter wilderness yet. But I very much want to be, and I think I can see the light through the trees.
I found this in my drafts from four years ago… wild are the winding walkways on which I’ve wandered.
Several years ago, I stopped saying that I work as a nurse so that my husband can do vocational ministry. We’re both in ministry. Whether I’m waiting tables or taking care of dying people, it’s all worship. It’s all service. It’s all ministry.
But dang, there is something seriously sacred about taking care of dying people. I’ve never left a day of work wondering if I did anything of importance. I haven’t had a crisis of career or purpose since taking that first hospice job.
I think I still feel this way.