All My Life: More Than a Passing Prayer
All my life you have been faithful.
This statement. This song. It gets me every time because it is so true. And there is such a strong connection to all the beauty and the pain that is acknowledged in those words. In that confession, cry, and praise. But I will keep it light.
I woke up early with a headache, sore throat, and a cold. But I had to work on three major proposals. Scratch that, I got to work on three major proposals for my fledgling business.
After about an hour, I looked at Jon and said, “Sometimes I am amazed by how my experiences have prepared me for this. I had to do all the things I have done to be able to do what I am doing now.” Maybe that sounds so obvious and clear to others, but my path has not been a straight line, even though I was a pretty straight line professionally from 3rd grade until my early thirties. I knew I wanted to be a teacher, and that is what I did. And I LOVED it. Until I didn’t.
My cousin, BJ, had a popular devotional blog and asked me to help him keep up with it by writing a post here and there. Enter my first experience with WordPress. I enjoyed writing, so I started my own blog.
We planted a church while I wrote a book (still teaching this whole time). Church planters have to learn to do everything that a startup does, so I watched videos and read posts to learn how to do social media, website design, and email communications. We co-pastored, so I also developed in public speaking, which led to some guest speaking opportunities.
I wanted to leave teaching because I couldn’t keep lying to students. I couldn’t keep failing them by allowing them to pass when they hadn’t earned it. But I had to. I didn’t have a choice. Leaving broke my heart while it healed it.
My friend found out I was looking for a job and knew my work in the church, so I became a marketer for her firm. My WordPress skills doubled. I learned the full Adobe Suite (and later Canva), business development principles, video editing, and adult learning principles (as I led some in-house training and managed several webinars).
Our hearts and hopes were shattered as our beautiful church, our second family, the fruit of our labor died a slow and painful death. COVID restrictions hit the second week after we moved into a new location. We limped it along, and I learned about working with multiple stakeholders and agencies to build a study center for low-income families. Students returned to school, but people did not return to church, and by the end of November 2021, we were crushed. And I feel the ache anew as I reflect on that season of feeling, for the first time in my life, directionless.
But I felt so thankful for it all today, and I hadn’t even realized what today is.
This evening Facebook reminded me that today marks the 4 year anniversary of when Christ Fellowship Church voted Jon in to be their pastor. The day a new church embraced us, and set me on a path to return to teaching so I could experience the frustration of broken systems and insecure leaders and broken children molded by misguided empathetic responses so I could create a solution beyond one classroom or one school while speaking the language of the educator, the entrepreneur, and the mother who just wants all her children, all the children young and grown to have a better path forward.
So yes, I expressed gratitude for the moments that brought me to sitting on the couch with a pounding headache and a laptop because I was doing work I love while writing a technical proposal with dreams of preparing someone else and someone else and someone else for just a bit more than what they were prepared for before.
I haven’t written every detail of the path from there to here, but it’s already more detailed than most care to read while scrolling online. But I just needed a moment before going to bed to say thank you in a way that was more than a passing thought.
A way to say again, “All my life you have been faithful. All my life you have been so, so good.”