Today I woke up and, as I do every morning, checked my email and Facebook accounts. My email this morning contained a note from my District Superintendent inviting me to submit a first draft of my ordination essays for my dCOM to review and approve next month. Then I went to my Facebook page, which handily reminds me at the top of my page that I work at Mt. Zion UMC as their Youth Director and Pastoral Intern, attend Wesley Theological Seminary and live in Washington, DC.
That may sounds like a singularly uninteresting morning, but today I was bowled over my reminders of just how far I've come in the last four years. Four years ago, I was a college junior (fifth year, because I had a meltdown during year 2 and failed five classes), looking for banking jobs after I graduated and becoming painfully aware that my horrific GPA was going to keep me from being accepted into any kind of graduate program. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life - I was thinking about a life in ministry, but I was well aware that my parents were going to flip their lids if I went down that road, and my church's first female pastor had just been appointed back home, throwing the church into chaos and resulting in nearly half the congregation seeking greener pastures at nondenominational churches nearby that did not recognize any woman's call to ministry. Marriage and family therapy seemed like a good way to help people that didn't involve so much pain and messiness (well, at least not MY pain and messiness). In the meantime, I already had several successful years under my belt at a local bank, and I knew that I could make enough in that industry to support myself right away, even if it wasn't my dream career.
Never would I have thought that two years later, I would leave a well-paying job at a small bank where my star was rapidly rising to move to DC, with no job and no prospects, to go to a seminary that chose to take me despite my horrendous GPA on the strength of recommendation letters written by people who believed in my call and my ability to excel at something I had never tried. The dorms often bear an uncanny resemblance to the set of "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest", but here at Wesley I have truly found my place, for perhaps the first time in my life. Today, I am blessed to run a growing youth program at Mt. Zion, staffed by amazing volunteers and filled to bursting with kids that I have learned to love the way my youth leaders loved me. And while the idea of those ordination essays still freaks the living daylights out of me, they are no longer an impossible height I could not hope to reach - just another step forward, another reason to grow, another call to become who I was created to be.
1 comment:
This is a phenomenally inspirational story, thanks for sharing. I think that everyone needs to do as you have done and truly find their calling in life. I was able to do so as I attended family therapy sessions with my spouse. We realized we weren't happy because we weren't living what we'd been called to do. We switched things and life has never been so sweet.
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