Tuesday of Lent 5

currents

I spend a lot of energy trying to convince myself notwithstanding all the anonymity, anomie, and rude, mean people, those pics of graduations and ordinations you see actually are real―no one has Photoshopped people into the pics, they really were there, and the events truly happened.

reprise

As I've thrown out snippets of my previous lives, I realize those activities were very different from my here and now. I've obsessed about Brighter City Day Camp, the six-week long annual summer program in City of History. Although I inherited the basic program structure and the name, I don't know what it was like before I arrived. I was grant writer, site director, van driver, treasurer, art teacher (from the second year on). By that second year I owned BCDC! I think of the Release Time Christian Education program I also took over as part of my job description. Again, I do not know what they did before me, but I was (grant writer, site director, van driver), liaise with the elementary school, and wrote an actual lectionary-based curriculum.

there, then, here, now

As I watched the Winter Olympics I remembered how ambitious I was, how hard I worked, and how I've achieved more than I'd ever imagined.

Back in a Former City, a now-deceased friend said to me, "This has been a catastrophic illness—what else do you call something that has cost you your friends and your career?" I replied, "I'm not at all worried. Before I turn around – no, before I blink – my life will be full again." I was very mistaken in terms of the participation I fully expected to find before I'd blinked this many times, yet...

Things – as in "my own things related to my life" – truly are moving and changing, and as I survey these past years, I'm happily amazed at how I've grown my theology, design/art, and music résumés. Despite a true dearth of opps to contribute my gifts locally. For example, when I look at the close to a dozen years I've been blogging here on desert spirit's fire, I remember I've never been much of a reader, and I almost never read anything other than school assignments (did well on most of those, usually completing 80% – 95%) and an occasional copy of Better Homes and Gardens magazine. Yet over this past decade I've read and considered dozens of books of my own choice, under my own steam, become an amazon vine reviewer, and generally lit a fire under myself to accomplish tasks that I trusted would benefit someone somewhere someday.