What Discernment Means to Me

As I was driving home from Mepkin Abbey, I thought about the fact that about a year ago, we started packing up our possessions in our process to get ready to begin the hurricane damage repair and restoration project.

Regular readers know that many of those possessions are still in boxes in the cottage.  As I drove the length of Florida on Monday, I gave myself a pep talk:  it's fine that things are still in boxes now, since the repairs and restorations took longer than expected.  It's not O.K. if they're still in boxes in a year.

Or maybe it will be O.K.  Maybe then I'll be convinced that there's no need to keep them.

Sometimes it's important to change our language.  Similarly, when I've been thinking about the future, I'm using words like discernment, as I think about the second half of life, and what I want that to look like.

What I'd really like (but I don't know if it would pay the bills): to work in a retreat center. To create retreats and programs that explore the intersections of creativity and spirituality--and I use those words creativity and spirituality in the largest ways possible. I think that the needs of people at midlife are overlooked by churches and by the larger society. We're so focused on youth and on the aging. I want to work in a place that's focused on the hungers and yearnings of people. That could happen in a higher education institution--but I'm distressed by how much debt we ask people to take on for a college degree and I'm weary of the compliance and assessment work that seems to come along with higher ed these days.

I also return to a vision of being a retreat coordinator who creates online retreats so that camps and retreat centers already in existence don't have to create them. They provide x amount of students, and for a pre-determined price, I deliver a retreat to those people. I can't imagine doing this part-time, but I'm also not yet ready to take the leap to creating that kind of company--lots of legwork.

I envision doing that, though, if something happens to my current job. Or if I keep thinking about it and creating a plan. I would yoke that with a dream of having a practice as a spiritual director--like a life coach, but with a spiritual lens.

While I was at Synod Assembly a few weeks ago, I talked to a woman who is finishing this program which gives a certificate in spiritual direction.  She says that there's a huge interest in people having a spiritual director. When one gets the certificate, one gets added to a database of directors. She's already had calls from people, even before she finished the program.

That program has a next class starting in Jan. of 2020, and right now, I'm leaning towards doing that regardless. I've been wanting to do this kind of program for a long time. This one is affordable and I can do it in my current job. It has on-campus intensive times, as do most distance learning programs, but it's a Wed-Sat. time, which is much more doable--the other program I was looking at for spiritual direction requires a week away. The seminary program I was thinking about requires a 2 week time away, which is not as easy in my current job.

Thinking of myself as being in a time of discernment helps my mood. I'm moving towards something different, although I'm unsure of the shape of it.