It’s been a while.
A long time since I just sat down to write without a deadline looming.
Without it being someone else’s project.
Without the pressure to say just the right thing for a specific audience.
It’s been a long time since I wrote just for me.
I started this blog in the summer of 2007 as a place to reflect and muse and capture all of the parts of myself, my story, my tradition that were important to keep carrying with me into the future. In many ways, the idea of salvaging all of these pieces of faith were intended to be a way of curating ideas that had value and meaning and importance in my life.
It never really mattered if anyone else read these pages, although it has been really nice to have company along the way 🙂
But somewhere in the midst of the busyness of church and other people’s projects and my marriage I just stopped writing. I stopped reflecting. I stopped looking around and processing what was happening in my life in this particular way.
But I have some time now.
Monday began a four week renewal leave from my church and one of my primary goals was to spend some of my time right here at the keyboard. Not because there is anything important I have to say, but because the very act of thinking and writing and processing itself is a spiritual practice that has been missing from my journey.
The fact that it took me a day or two to actually sit down with the laptop says a little bit of something about the hesitation that I’m feeling about doing so. I think, in part, that is because so much of my life lately has revolved around the church. I’m afraid that if I sit down to write, I’ll just get sucked back in to it all. That I’ll lose my ability to truly disconnect for a few weeks and re-center myself in who I am.
So for now, here’s a list of things I’d like to write about:
- How the Rooney Rule (and its mixed results) might provide guidance for the draft Book of Doctrines and Disciplines proposed by the WCA
- Does wanting to preserve the parts of our connectional nature and structure that are working make me an institutionalist? And if so, can I live with / accept that label? What does it mean to salvage the best parts of who we are and take them with us into the future, instead of starting over?
- Why I think the Protocol is our best option for the mission of the church to make disciples and transform the world
- What I’ve learned about what it means to equip the saints… the hard way… from failing to do so and overfunctioning in a mid-sized church.
There.
Now those things are set to the side and off my mind. I might pick them back up in the next few weeks. Or maybe not.
After all, this leave is not about the UMC or my local church or my ministry there. It is about looking out at everything else in my life. My marriage, my family, my relationship with God, the things that make me laugh and feed my soul, my friendships. It is about taking some time to dig through everything else that makes me me and working to salvage the things I might have discarded or ignored or let lie fallow for a bit.
To pick up those pieces and put them back together in a way that feels whole and good and right.
And to relearn how to preserve and protect them so that when I head back to work, they don’t take a back burner.
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