Sunday, October 26, 2014

Finding purpose in work

A few years ago our then-associate pastor was prone to post on Facebook about how rewarding her work was… and how much she enjoyed it… and how rewarding it was. I remember vividly reading her posts with envy: all of us can’t work for the church preaching sermons, having conversations with people about their faith, planning weddings, etc. 

So I did what I try to do, which I’m sometimes more successful than at other times: I prayed about it. 

If memory serves me correctly, I prayed a number of times. I was working in a job that didn’t tell me how rewarding it was. We knew how fortunate we were to work in a department that allowed us considerable schedule flexibility but that was it. 

I don’t always expect answers to my prayers. I pray about getting old but I don’t expect to get any younger. But I started seeing my work differently. I was working as a Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement analyst but I started seeing that I was doing more than watching and manipulating numbers and codes. I was improving my hospital’s reimbursement. I was really improving my hospital’s finances so my hospital could extend healthcare in our region. I was helping spread healthcare into further—needed—corners of our region. 
I started loving my job. How could I not?! Sometimes work was crazy whenever my hospital opened a new clinic, extended hours, or offered a service they hadn’t offered before, I knew I had helped expand healthcare in my region.

I actually had mixed feelings when I left that department a year ago… but I had this sense of the Spirit telling learning that valuable lesson about work prepared me for job I have now, working as an enrollment counselor. 

Work can get old. We can lose sight of why it matters what we do. We wonder if others see it—or appreciate it. We’re likely to stay there if we don’t pray about it. And listen. The circumstances don’t need to change as much as I need to change.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

... and I didn't know it



Last Friday I sat down in our hotel room and started writing on a poem while my partner napped. It’s my first poem, if you don’t count the haiku I have been writing for the last couple years or so. The whole poetry thing has been growing in me for quite some time. It has seemed strange to me that poetry would start calling to me as it is something I have always struggled to get. In my college literature class I breezed through fiction and drama but I really had to work at poetry and I still didn’t think I got it.

But it’s been calling to me, to which my bookshelves can testify. Mostly, I’ve dabbled in reading it or about it but I hadn’t attempted to write anything.

Until Friday. So I wrote without much attention to where it was going. I wrote until what was in me to write seemed written and I stopped and moved on to other things.

Saturday we spent the day with the German student we had hosted a couple years back. We went to the Cleveland Museum of Art (consider this a recommendation). Later we drove him and another on his delegation to the airport. Sunday morning we headed home.


Sunday evening, after I had unpacked and started some laundry I looked at the poem again.

O.M.G. The poem had a theme that I hadn’t intended and hadn’t seen before. I didn’t so much write the poem as it wrote itself to me. The experience has been deeply spiritual. I know on some level that poetry is/should be spiritual but it really wasn’t my intent when I started writing.

Like Jacob, God was in this place and I didn’t know it. I’m left with this even stronger sense that the Presence is always with us… if we can find a way to step aside and let it show itself to us. I don’t feel I’m especially good at recognizing God in the moment so I feel very much like Jacob when I look back on my day—or a poem I have written—and surprised to see that God was there and I didn’t know it.