This past year, I\’ve made it a goal to read more. Super non-specific on the number, type, and length of books because honestly, I\’m just taking it one day at a time here, and if it\’s not going to catch my attention, I\’m not going to muscle through it for the sake of finishing. There were a couple of years there, especially after I started my nursing career, where reading became incredibly difficult. Something about the anxiety of nursing made it impossible for me to sit still with my thoughts, and it probably didn\’t help that I tried to finish books I thought I SHOULD read, rather than books that I actually felt good reading.
After having two children, there was a point where I felt like I was either going to shrivel up into nothing or explode. I don\’t know if this is something that everyone goes through so vividly, but I know from the many conversations I\’ve had with friends who are parents that something about having children is both life-giving AND life-sucking. When my husband and I first tried out marriage counseling, we both took a personality test for the Enneagram and I was flabbergasted. I spent a majority of the time staring at each question because I could not discern my actual desires or perception of myself. I had given so much of my self and my time to my family that neglected to do the things I wanted to do (something I am still working on!).
Hence… reading.
In the past, it had been a consistent source of life-giving inspiration and motivation, something that challenged me, broadening my understanding of the world and myself. After going through a few Youtube videos and blog posts from other people, I decided to read books that would either be relevant to my current interests or just fun, and not sweat it too much if somewhere along the way, I got bored enough to just walk away.
So I got started. One of the first books I started to read was written by an old pastor of mine entitled Reimagining Apologetics: the Beauty of Faith in a Secular Age, by Dr. Justin Bailey. Ok, I admit, I didn\’t understand a ginormous chunk of the book because honestly, he talks a lot about specific authors and I\’ve never read any of their works and I probably won\’t in the near future (sorry PJ!). BUT, it definitely messed with me in the best way. One of the things I had always admired in his preaching and teaching, and now in his writing, was his ability to articulate spiritual concepts that made the lived experience with Christ tangible, practical and beautiful, which I feel is a very particular and rare skill.
It\’s hard to describe why a book on the imagination and apologetics was so deeply affecting, but it has to do with something I feel in passages like this:
\”… the imagination is the embodied human faculty concerned with possibility. The imagination perceives possible ways of being in the world, is captivated by other possibilities, and seeks to negotiate a space for life amid possibility… in exercising out imaginations, we are looking for connection amid chaos, using our imagination as an \’organ of meaning.\’ We must make sense of the world. But paradoxically, we seek concrete meaning by moving in a subjunctive mood, exploring possibilities, in search of a firmer grip on reality, using the imagination as an organ of truth.\”
-Dr. Justin Bailey, Reimagining Apologetics: the Beauty of Faith in a Secular Age
I couldn\’t quite shake the feeling quotes like this gave me, like I was just at the start of something. I had been imagining myself as a faith community nurse or health minister for so many years, but it was like coals beneath ashes, the heat hardly felt. It felt as though someone added logs to the fire and I was blazing with a desire for more. In allowing myself to use and exercise my imagination, which had atrophied over the past few years, my sense of the future exploded into so many different possibilities. And I am still constantly trying to envision ways to feel out the future with the imaginative sense.
But over the last few weeks, I\’ve come across a bump in the road. Covid, the pandemic, wanting to protect my family, friends, coworkers, and patients, and a general low-medium sense of caution has made the journey into health ministry a slow one. Whereas I might have tried something like a blood pressure clinic or doing questionnaires at a small, intimate church, two things have gotten in my way. 1) A blood pressure clinic requires a lot of physical contact and close face-to-face interactions and 2) we recently moved from a small-medium sized church to an actual mega-church, which means I don\’t have the contacts or relationships I might have been able to lean on in order to start something like this up without some serious loss of sleep and time
In the midst of this dry spell, I came across another book that piqued my curiosity entitled Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon. Short, quick, and to the point, it mainly speaks to anyone who is endeavoring to do anything creative or new. It really sounds like it\’s made for online content creators, interested in making the thing they love into something that also makes a living. Well… I\’m kinda there, even if it\’s not quite the content I normally think of as being profitable or \”virtual-able,\” if that makes sense. He argues that getting \”discovered\” is a combination of both getting good at what you do or what you love AND working in a way that make you discoverable. Even if you\’re just getting started on learning something, he believes in putting it out into the universe, learning experiences included.
There\’s definitely a lot more in the book, but I thoroughly enjoyed it as someone who is seeking to try something new. What am I good at? How can I show my work? What do I want to end up doing? How do I get there? What am I learning as a result of trying to get there?
This blog is just one way of doing it, but is there more? Are there other ways? And for the love of God, is there are better name for who I am and where I want to be than \”pursuing the devoted life\”?!?!
All in good time. All in God\’s time. In the meantime, I\’ll keep imagining, keep trying to \”show my work\” in the hopes that somewhere along the way, the desires God created in me and my future will meet.