It’s almost Labor Day, public schools are back in, UMYF is meeting, there’s a different schedule at work, new and old friends have been appearing around town. It must be fall.
Even though it’s been a couple of years since autumn directly meant the start of a new school year for me, it’s easy to see this time of year as the start if things. And it is the start of my fist full school year working at First UMC. We had our first youth meeting of the school year Sunday night, and even though I didn’t get to spend half the time talking about events that I thought I would get, I did get to tell everyone about some of the new adventures I’ve got panned for this year. Going to some new Junior and Senior High retreats. Bible Study. Different Sunday School plans. Bigger scale summer missions through two of my favorite organizations in the world. And doing some annual events better than I did them last year.
It will be interesting next June when I start going through records from this year. Plans and schedules and my written notes in each of the event folders in my office. I’ll see what we actually pulled off and what we didn’t. I’ll see what resolutions I stuck with. Because I feel lIke that’s something I’m doing right now: making new year resolutions.
One of them is to write.
I’ve had several conversations lately with friends who are educators. They have to figure out from Facebook to cell phones to face-to-face relationships with the same people in different locations, how much of their life is public and how much is absolutely not. Some of those decisions are a lot easier for me in youth ministry, because I simply couldn’t do my job if I wasn’t Facebook friends with all of my students, or able to call or text them. Granted, my phone has 64 gigs of memory so I never have to delete any of those conversations. I do have to think about keeping records and being intentionally transparent.
And one of those other safety things I have done since last October is that I haven’t been blogging. Sure, there were a few posts from Pilgrimage and Beach Retreat and my short stint in Ecuador this spring. But I haven’t been recording my daily life like I once did. And it’s been hard. And in some ways it’s been way too easy. You’d think I’d have filled my personal journal three times by now, but the entries in there are just as sparse as they are here on my blog.
It makes me sad that there’s really not a record of my thoughts and emotions since I finished Quito Quest 2011. Whoever eventually succeeds me in my job at FUMC is really going to think I went overboard with my event notes. But other than that, my fears, failures, triumphs, quotes, funny moments, ideas, opinions, revelations, and stray thoughts for 10+ months are only in my head. And I’m sure some of those random and fleeting spurts of brain activity are just gone.
So that’s why my new school year resolution is to write. More specifically, to blog. Having a somewhat-public medium for expression means I have some sort of accountability. When I had days in Ecuador where all I did was watch Lost and go to McDonalds on a Saturday, I felt I had to justify that to my audience. Even when Dana and John were probably the only ones reading it anymore. And if I could say I was just dead after six straight days of learning and growing and struggling through what God was teaching me, then I at least had a more positive outlook on my state of being once I hit the “Publish” button. And if I couldn’t, I made judicious use of my unlimited Skype plan until I’d connected with someone and either tried to offer my own advice or learned something more than what happened to the Dharma Initiatve for the day.
I have about the same sense of what is okay (about my job and life in the U.S.) and not okay to write about now. I can put those rules I have for myself into words much better than I could last October, though I’m not going to do that for y’all at the moment. I am going to say, though, that you’ll be hearing about my adventures.
Because my life is an adventure. Whether I live in the rain forest of Ecuador or the swamps of northeastern North Carolina. A friend of mine tells me frequently that every day he looks at his cat and asks her “What the hell’s gonna happen today?” And I understand what he means. I would want an Oraculum for my life lately if it would be someone else’s responsibility to name each day. I had to look up how to spell Frabjous and Horovendoush just to finish this post with such an awesome reference.