An Old Emergence

A couple weeks ago, I posted on Facebook that I had made some big life decisions. Well, here we are. Today is my last day at Capital Teas. And to make things more interesting, I do not have another job lined up yet. This is terrifying. However, I have never felt more right about a job-related decision in my life.  So why did I do it? That's the real question. And it comes down to something I have never been great at: a leap of faith. I have had a great life plan multiple times in my life. I have wanted EVERYTHING planned in great detail, even if none of those plans actually panned out. When it comes to taking risks, going out on faith, I am woefully unprepared. Yet here I am. Out on faith. Let's be fair, I had a pretty good job. It paid my bills. There was potential for advancement. I knew the industry. I knew where I stood (most of the time). But I wasn't happy. I know people will say that happiness is fleeting and that job security is important. But I was...

Let me begin by saying that this particular post is more of a long-form story than my usual four paragraphs and a quote. But I’ve been away for a year and thought it would be a good idea to update everyone on what has been going on. It’s been a truly transformative year, and I am excited to share what has transpired in my life. It feels like only yesterday that I was contemplating taking a year-long sabbatical from social media. Even I was skeptical about whether or not I would be able to last a few days, much less 12 months. As I look back over my original goals and aims for the year, I can’t help but laugh at how some of those goals (as with most New Year’s resolutions) fell quickly by the wayside. Yet, I ended up achieving goals I hadn’t even set for myself. And, overall, I can confidently say that my year “unplugged” was a positive one. I put “unplugged” in quotations because I came to understand that it is very nearly impossible to spend extended periods of time truly unp...

We’re that kind of old… Where we are but we’re not But we’re expected to be Yet not treated like we are. Youth is less who we are And more what we have That we’re slowly losing. And we act like we want to lose it Even though we know when it’s gone We’ll just want it back. We’re that kind of old…

I cannot write anymore. I had a good streak there for a couple of years. I blogged fairly regularly about this or that, pretending that my theological opinion was some great gift to the blogosphere. In my mind, so many people read what I was writing. I was making some kind of impact on the lives of someone, surely. Then I stopped writing. The “real world” took over, and my career moved me to a new city. I began working 60-hour weeks, and in the process forgot to post blogs. Forgot to write at all.

As summer appears to be stretching fervently into September, I am reminded how much I despise hot weather. After spending eight weeks on the road this summer working for Passport Camps (half of which was spent in the blistering 3-digit degree temperatures of Dallas), I am officially home and have moved on to the next season of my life.

It is fairly disheartening to have a vision but no means to achieve it. Barriers seem to multiply the closer you get to true revelation, but none is so discouraging as age. It seems like everywhere I turn lately I am confronted with the fact that my young age keeps people from taking what I have to say seriously.

In the days and weeks to come, I will have a more measured response to the tragedies of the last week. From the utter destruction in my home state of Alabama to the grievous celebrations surrounding the assassination of Osama bin Laden; it is truly a time for reflection and mourning. There are many conversations that must happen regarding faith and disaster, justice and murder, “good” and “evil”.

Over the last three weeks I have had the opportunity to spend some time with the youth group at my new church, Baptist Church of the Covenant. We have been participating in what is a yearly event at BCOC called “School for Christian Living” during which time the church restructures its normal Sunday school hour into a three-hour seminar. This time is broken into two sessions with a lunch break in between.

I got the opportunity to spend four days in Nashville last week. It was indescribably wonderful to hang out with my friends whom I miss terribly. I really do have the best friends in the world. The laughter, the hugs, the deep conversations…all were things I needed more than I realized. But along the way I began to discover something that shocked me. I actually began to miss home. I really don’t like Birmingham. Compared to Nashville, it just isn’t a particularly exciting place to live. Yet I’ve started to make it my life. Now that I have (almost) fully moved into my new living space, I feel like I’m here for the long haul.

(if you missed part 1, you can check it out here) I am resolved to do things differently this year. I am finding out that I have a fair bit of time on my hands post-graduation, pre-working. While I anticipate having a job of some sort secured by next week, I will still have a significantly larger amount of time on my hands than when I was in school. So I'm going to be intentional with my time.

Belmont’s motto is “From here to anywhere,” and while I may be guilty of cracking jokes about that sometimes, these words have transformed from being simply a motto to having deep meaning for me over the last four and a half years. I discovered who I was called to be at Belmont. This is a profound statement considering who I was when I started classes in August of 2006. I had just begun the process of working out my inherited faith, and having been fairly well burned by the churches of my youth, I had no desire to seek out a church home in Nashville. It was a perfect paradox. I firmly believed that Christian community was essential to growth as a believer, and yet I was running away from church at full speed.

I like lists. They help me be goal-oriented in a way that my self-diagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder finds particularly satisfying. I make a summer reading list every May of books I wish to encounter in my time off from required reading. More often than not I will include the most recent book I completed so that I may begin my list with an accomplished task. Few things are more fulfilling to me than marking things off a list. I also make lists as reminders. These lists mostly appear when I am packing for a trip or preparing for a presentation. They're far less task-oriented than my other lists, and they help combat my poor short-term memory. I made a list last night that is far different than any of these others lists. I wrote down the names of twelve people. Seven months from now it will be the first day of January 2011. I will have graduated from Belmont and will be on the next part of my life's journey, whatever that may be. I have seven months left at Belmont and, perh...

Yesterday I found myself having multiple conversations about the future. In fact, lately I've found that subject matter to be inescapable. Perhaps it comes from being near to graduation...or at least sort of near. Many of my friends will soon be graduating, and I have begun turning my eyes toward December and my own graduation. As I do this, one pervasive question continually comes up: What's next? I can assure you this is only the first of what will most likely be many writings on the future by me. As a senior in college, the future has started to loom menacingly on the horizon. However, this concept of looking toward the future is not reserved for college seniors. One of my conversations yesterday was with my friend Grant, a freshman at Belmont. We were both struggling with the same question. What's next? About this time of year as winter struggles in its death throws and spring begins to emerge, I believe many of us look for newness, for refreshment. Grant later asked, ...