A Call To Becoming

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.

Convicted in the depths of a snowstorm

As you probably know, DC has been under attack by a snowstorm (alternatively named everything from Snowmegeddon to Snowtorious B.I.G.) since Friday. As a result, we're nearing a week with no classes, no work, and little to no means of transportation.

This morning at about 8 a.m. the real blizzard hit, with freezing cold winds and swirling snow. My roommates and I were all off work, talking and laughing over breakfast, when my roommate Kris got quiet.

As we cleaned up breakfast, he started bundling up to go outside. He packed a backpack with a thermos of coffee and with food. I jokingly asked him if he was so sick of us that he was leaving.

"No," he said. "I'm going to church. I have to go let Miguel and Manuel in."

A little background: my roommates Kris and Kristine (husband and wife) have been in DC for 2 1/2 years. They hadn't been to church in ages when they came, but they started coming to my church soon after they arrived. Over the last two years, they've discovered faith, joined the church, and become two of the most active and encouraging members. Kris works at the White House; Kristine teaches ESL at a community college. And they challenge me every day in the ways they live out their faith.

Miguel and Manuel are two men who live on the steps of our church. Kris befriended them soon after they arrived and regularly does things with them. He eats with them, he lets them into the church to shower, he helps them find a free clinic when one of them has a cut. Now that Kris and Kristine are purchasing a home (into which they, my other roommate Rosalyn and, once they're married, her fiance Ben, and I will move), Kris is looking for ways for Manuel and Miguel to move in with us, too. It's not a matter of mercy or of guilt for Kris; it's simply his way of looking at what could be and finding ways to live into the Kingdom of God.

So this morning Kris set out in the snowstorm to do what he could do: trek a little over a mile to the church, open the doors, and sit with his two friends somewhere out of the cold. He's still gone, and I'm guessing that he will be all day. For Kris, people are more important than time, and he's amazing at being fully present with anyone.

Meanwhile, I've been catching up on work, doing laundry, calling prospective students...and being really convicted as I think about Kris, vocation, and call. Kris has a great job, and he's great at it. He has no desire and no call to leave that. But he also knows that he is called to love God and neighbor, and he does that in amazing ways.

I'm wrestling with my own call, particularly as it relates to ordination. Yet in that process, I too often forget the very basics - that we are all called, as followers of Jesus Christ, to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. To love God and to love neighbor as ourselves. To preach the Kingdom of God come to earth - and to live into that new reality. And whether or not I am ordained, that means that the ways I spend my money, speak to people on the streets, and use my time, yes, even during a snowstorm should be affected.

God, may my questions about vocation and my attention to learning and ministry NEVER get distract me from your primary call to love You and serve my neighbors throughout the world and on my front steps.