It's Official...

My request to enter discernment was made public on Sunday morning at church. I felt awkward, but excited...my relationship with God is such a personal thing...yet it is now so public, and needs to be.

There were only three of us sopranos in the choir, which meant that I was mostly hidden from view behind the organ. I didn't have my words for this yet...so remained silent.

When the service had ended, there were many hugs and congratulations.

And silences.

Redefinitions need to be made. Clarifications are needed. Relationships reassessed. This comes with any change.

Discerning between...what?

I have to admit I was tickled to hear that when my letter was read to the board, it was greeted by a moment of 'stunned silence'.

When I was a full-time drama teacher, 'stunned silence' meant one of two things: the work being received was either amazingly good or apallingly bad. Either one forced me into a 'heightened now', a place where I pulled together all of my knowledge and skills to articulate my perceptions and guide my learners to the next step. My understanding of my church board's stunned silence is that I am the third candidate in the last 6 years to make this request.

No one with whom I have shared this decision has been really surprised, once they've had a bit of time to process it. My church friends have been delighted...the only determinedly secular friend who I've told expressed concern about how my husband would feel 'when you're better at it than he is'.

I've heard that newly apprehended prisoners who are guilty sleep like babies in their cell, while the innocent lie awake. I guess I am 'guilty', because I have been so at peace with this decision.

Actually, when I stop to think about it, I have a tendency to giggle.

I am in no real hurry, knowing that the process is lengthy, but since I spent so much time struggling with the decision to enter discernment, it would be nice for it to begin relatively soon--like January, or February. But when I received the phone call from the minister from a nearby town who sits on our board, she explained that the United Church is in the middle of redesigning or redesignating the ministries.

I can't very well enter discernment when we don't know what options exist to discern between.

In the meantime, I hold these things in my heart, I ponder, and every now and then, as I work with our data on literacy, I have a little giggle.

Of Remembrance...

Today is Remembrance Day.

I hear my daughters saying goodbye as my husband heads off to work. I need to type this quickly and shower so that I can get a load of laundry in before their breakfast. I won't see them again until tomorrow night, and I am all too aware that they are approaching the end of childhood. The next few years will pass too quickly.

I will go to work this morning, and will spend an hour at my desk, finally getting to a data job that I wanted to have finished 2 weeks ago. I will then, resentfully, because I will only be a quarter of the way through that job, descend to a meeting, where it will take an hour for everyone to 'get on the same page', before beginning the hashing and slashing out of the details for a presentation that will itself undergo two or three reworkings over the next while. I will regretfully leave my desk at the end of the day, because I know that I won't have finished what I had started in the morning, but I will need to get home to pack and fly to tomorrow's meeting...and to call my brother, because it is his birthday.

May I not forget what truly matters within the mundane of today.

..and the world is about to turn...

The tune of 'Star of County Down' runs through my head this morning, with the lyrics from Voices United: "and the world is about to turn."

Against the exciting hope for change in Empire with the election of Barack Obama, came the news that 195 jobs in our local mill will end in two weeks.

Domtar's press release came at the end of the day--as usual, ensuring that the local newspaper, a weekly, had gone to press before they could add the story. The glib and unconcerned voice of Domtar's vice-president, interviewed in Montreal by CBC radio, sickened me. His stats are friends and husbands of friends. They are the parents of children who are already struggling to find their places in the world.

These workers deserved better than to hear that their jobs would end in two weeks. They deserved better than to hear it on the radio or from a friend calling to ask what was going on.
And our community will deserve better than to hear 'oh well, at least the pulp is still operational".

a calm continues...

I wake this morning to stark bare branches against a blue sky.

I feel calm. I grow aware that part of me must have been waiting to see if I would go through some sort of emotional hangover, that perhaps my decision to enter discernment was born of an over-excited condition caused by stress...

Picture a disheveled Jonah on the beach, checking himself over as the whale disappears over the horizon...

But all I am feeling right now is a calmness. I am wondering how the Board meeting went last night and how long it will be before a committee will be set. I rewrote my letter to remove the line about privacy--I didn't want the hoopla that attended my husband's announcement--no hallelujah jazz hands, please--but the reactions of others to my relationship with God is out of my hands.

My calm comes from the sense of 'rightness', that things are in 'right relationship'. This Jonah is, at least, on the right beach.

And my brother has a job offer.

...a job that's meaningful...

In my hometown, there is a pile of rubble--all that is left of the paper mill that provided a livelihood for hundreds of families. My father laboured there until his retirement. For my brother, it was a different story.

When the mill shut down, my brother, in his mid-forties, found his way into mineral exploration. The outdoor work suited him; his intelligence and work ethic put him into a leadership role almost immediately.

And now, with the price of metals, his job is gone.

When he called to tell us, I told him about my decision to enter discernment.

"I just need something meaningful," I said.

"I think teaching kids to read and think is pretty meaningful," he said.

"It's important," I said, "but it's not meaningful to me any more."

This decision has changed nothing in my situation--I will continue as I have--except that it has changed everything in my situation--because my eyes have a new focal point on a distant horizon. My talents, my skills, my education, my faith -- all meet there. Patterns of behaviour at work that used to keep me tense and stressed are revealed as pathetic attempts to control what cannot be controlled--chains have slipped from me...I've stepped out of my old skin...

Discernment is a 12 month process once the committee is set. Working and taking distance ed for the M. Div. means a steady income and no drastic changes for our daughters. My retirement date is November 2015...the year our youngest will graduate from high school.

I have the luxury of self-actualization, while others, like my brother, experience life as a struggle much closer to the survival end of the continuum.