I left this story hanging in July, right before things began to take off. You may remember that all I had was a picture of a tunnel with some light at the end. Step by step, I hoped I might get out of the darkness and into the light.
A few weeks after I posted that story, everything changed.
Within two days, I had a 501(c)(3), a firstborn to launch, and I picked up a contract. I had to laugh, but I wanted to cry. I felt frustrated by everything happening simultaneously instead of bit by bit when I had ample time.
Thus began the project of building the plane in the air.
First, let me back up.
Shortly after I sensed that I needed to take steps toward the light, I met with a small team of friends who were praying for my next steps. At that point, it was clear to me that turning in resumes for jobs as a method of discernment was not working.
My heart knew what I needed to do. I just really wanted to find someone to pay me to do it.
The discernment team asked me if I felt ready to start my own ministry organization. With reluctant clarity, I said yes. I was hesitant because I still did not like the idea. I was clear because I had to admit the fruitlessness of the four months prior. The best I could do was to take one step at a time and see if there was confirmation down this road.
Slowly but surely, there was. It would be hard to recall all the steps in detail now. In short, I spent early 2024 consulting with a few churches, leading local prayer groups for parents, speaking at retreats, and gradually filling out paperwork for a non-profit in the cheapest way possible. (Because the nearly $1000 of upfront costs to start the ministry were $1000 I did not have at the time.)
Still, I felt unsure of precisely what I was building. Was it a prayer movement for the next generation? Was it a consulting ministry for healthy churches? (Why would churches pay me to help make them healthy?) Was it a ministry to families? Would I be speaking and teaching? As it turns out, it’s a little of all those things. I am trying to find all the appropriate words to describe this succinctly on a forthcoming website. That feels vulnerable too.
It seems obvious, but I had no idea that following Jesus’ call to ministry in a renewed sense of vulnerable dependence would require building every piece like I got a new Lego set with a step-by-step manual. In other words, none of the who, how, or what would come primarily from my strategic gifts, which I had relied on my whole career. Instead, it would be a process of following directions, even being willing to experiment with ministry ahead of knowing everything I wanted to do.
So many of the concerns I had been expressing in my prior senior ministry management role were obsolete when I considered created something new. The choice was mine to do ministry more organically and trust the Lord to provide.
I have a big vision for this little airplane called All Gen Movement. We are living in a time when one could easily say that God’s promises do not seem to be true for our kids, the Church, or the future. But I believe the Spirit has been doing a work of renewal before the crumbling even began. Like the twelve getting sent out with the bare minimum, I feel like I am on a journey to share Jesus’s healing ministry.
This healing is what we need.
Falling off a cliff with no one to catch me was painful. Getting scraped off the pavement was not much better.
But as these stories go, the longer the time passes, eventually, we get a broader perspective of why it had to be this way.
My work requires freedom to operate away from systems that do harm.
Outside the constraints of a management job.
I am used to being a loyal employee who tries to bring up concerns in the context of values.
Now, I am creating with the Creator.
Being an employee was much easier.
But right now, for me, this feels much more sacred.
And, yes, on most days, the whole process feels a bit insane too.
Photo taken after speaking at my last work conference, flying home into the unknown.
The last few years have been a plot twist for my family. If you had asked me to describe my life prior, I would have called it complex. Even so, within complexity, we had few curveballs until the recent season of life hurled a number of them.
When your prior structure and framework for your life becomes a rug pulled out from under you, first, you will experience disruption and disorientation. Then, there is an opportunity to go through a process of healing. The healing has to do with figuring out what is accurate and true. You must dig deeper to discover what was false or faulty about your previous operational mode.
My conclusion about such healing is this–it feels like dying.
In other words, there is a lengthy stage in the healing process where you shed the old and do not yet have the new. This process is a slow, pronounced kind of dying. It is hard to explain unless you have gone through it because it is a dying into health, putting to death things that you will not bring forward with you.
This phenomenon is well-documented. You can read Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward or St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul to think about this on a spiritual and soul level. Or, you can think about it on a medical and bodily level. If you have surgery and a serious recovery process, you may feel temporarily worse before you feel better. The passageway between what was and will be is both painful and inconvenient.
A Real-Life Metaphor
The latest life-inspired metaphor to help ponder this is an appliance flood in our home on December 2nd.
We had just finished a lovely Thanksgiving weekend with our college-age daughter home for her first break. It was the Monday after. She was back at school, my husband was on a plane for a work trip, and I was on my morning Zoom call when I stepped out of our home office to make tea. What greeted me was a washing machine failure from the load I had thrown in just before the call.
Initially, it looked like an inconvenient derailment of my Monday morning, but when I saw the extent of the nooks and crannies the water had flowed into, it became a disruption on a much larger scale. By that evening, insurance had sent a water remediation company to tear out our floors and cut into our walls. They removed any damp materials and left us with eight industrial fans blowing at a deafening frequency.
The beginning of the demolition
What began as a hopeful Monday morning for quiet work and a peaceful start to the extras of the holiday season turned upside down. I asked the contractor for his honest timeline estimate. He told me two months. Four weeks have passed, and his estimate seems accurate. We have made it through the worst. The contractors patched up our walls the day before Christmas, but our possessions and our dining table continue to sit in the garage. Rugs cover a pathway through the rooms so we do not have to stand on hard, cold concrete.
I am seeing in a new way from this unfortunate experience.
Quick Break, Slow Repair
Damage happens relatively quickly. (It took less than 1 hour for the water from one load of laundry to damage half of our first floor.) The demolition is less instantaneous but also relatively quick. I had no time to waste as I pulled every towel out of our linen closet and got to work in back-breaking labor, even pulling out the heavy washing machine that I have seen contractors struggle to move in a moment of Herculean strength. Then, without delay, insurance made sure to do damage control by tearing out every area of dampness and throwing it away.
The process gets slow once the damage is done and the demolition is complete. The rebuild does not begin or proceed with the same sense of urgency.
It would have increased the cost of the claim if the insurance were to act slowly, allowing the water to do more damage. But in rebuilding they take time to negotiate with the contractors over every nickel and dime. They make slow determinations between their other urgent jobs. Then, the estimator finds contractors that can do the work within the parameters of the insurance claim. Because it is the holiday season, the progress is even slower.
Living in Between
On the other end, you have us, the homeowners. We have to live in a state of disrepair. It looks bleak and requires a lot of patience and renegotiating what life looks like daily as you try to cook and live in a disrupted environment. If someone were to walk into my house on the day all those fans were blowing (as several neighbors did), they would say what a disaster (as they did). However, as awful as it looked, those were the first stages of the rebuild. We were preparing a dry foundation.
One of my least favorite days. Living in a state of mayhem as repairs were underway on Dec. 23.
It looked better with the floor in tact, but underneath, dampness was going to mold. The day the floors were left bare and the concrete exposed was the first step in creating something new.
In other words, when it most looked like a catastrophe, the rebuild was underway. Likewise, there are moments that most look like death, where healing is underway. I could see the rebuilding stage in a new way and understand my life in the last year or so.
Hope in Rebuilding
Rebuilding is disruptive but promising. If damage happened without your agency, it is not your chosen path. The only way out is rebuilding and in that stage you are about to experience a good thing.
Things will go wrong in the process. It will feel like chaos and disorient you again. (I have never heard of a rebuilding process for anything without setbacks, mistakes, or delays.) However, brick by brick, you are headed in the right direction.
It feels terrible when you cannot appreciate the progress. When things are incomplete, it can facilitate despair. But when you understand the small steps with gratitude and keep your eyes on the bigger picture (we are getting new floors, new paint, a new washer, new floorboards, etc.), you can persevere. You can have some hope.
If the rebuild process is causing you despair, I understand.
But, I want to offer a perspective I am learning: you deserve to be congratulated. You already made it through the damage and the demolition. You are on the road to something better, something new. Not every day will look like any amount of progress. And some days, nothing truly advances. But you have every right to have hope. This stage is not a teardown. It is a piece-by-piece renovation.
If you are like I was last year, in a season of despair and disorientation, you may not have the capacity to hope (yet). I just want you to know, I have hope for you. From where I stand now, I empathize with your pain, and also see the potential for a significant rebuild in your life–one that will give you what you need for the future rather than keep things as they were in the past.
A Quiet Rebuild
The same principle applies on a macro level. Individuals have been experiencing damage, demolition, and rebuilding, but so has our society. Rather than living in rubble, we can clear it away and build something new over time. The other side of collapse is the first stone being laid.
Christmas is the beginning of a renovation phase. Christ came to earth as a new beginning, the second Adam. The first man and woman acted in ways that brought about damage to every generation. Subsequent generations, like Noah’s, had to deal with the demolition that followed.
The incarnation is a quiet rebuild, a flutter in a young woman’s womb that became light and hope for the world. It looked like nothing, but it was quite something.
You may be engulfed by atrocious damage done to you and others. You may be watching the rubble pile up in the teardown, debilitated like I was a year ago. But if you know the Christmas story, you know the angels, shepherds, and magi were the early witnesses to humanity’s rebuilding.
It did not look like much when he was born among the animals to unimportant people in a tiny city. The threat of more rubble came in the form of edicts for infanticide and crossing borders seeking refuge.
Rebuilds are long and slow. What looks like wreckage today is a new beginning for our home and family.
I believe the same for you. Where you are is not where you will end up.
Damage comes with the loudest bang but is the shortest visitor.
The teardown may take a little while.
But the longest leg of the journey is the rebuilding. And building is good. Piece by piece, you will get there.
It was two springs ago that I brought home a gardenia tree aglow with bright, white, fragrant buds. It was gorgeous. The occasion was to celebrate the end of a long season, punctuated by breakthroughs and new beginnings. My intent was to look at it every spring when it bloomed as a reminder of God’s faithfulness and goodness.
In a matter of days, it shriveled up completely. Every flower, and eventually every leaf, died. I called the nursery to ask what happened and they told me, “It’s either dead or it’s in transplant shock. You won’t know which one until next year, but just keep treating it like it’s alive and you’ll see.”
It was at that moment that transplant shock became my go-to metaphor for everyone and everything in the post-pandemic world, including myself.
This gardenia has a prime spot on our patio in a large decorative pot. Though I was committed to seeing out its destiny, when it became too ugly to justify its occupancy, I pruned every last wilted leaf and brown flower from the tree in an attempt to eliminate the worst blight. The next month, while preparing the patio for a party, my husband suggested we might want to toss the tree. I told him it might not be dead. He looked incredulous. I understood his skepticism. There was nothing about it that connoted a potential for a comeback.
The next week it developed one small green shoot coming out of an otherwise dry branch.
As the months passed, I impatiently and intently studied every green shoot that arrived on my prophetic little transplant-shocked tree and treated them like an answered prayer. It was a visible example of slow growth and the faith to believe something was happening in the soil and roots.
One day, I realized the best, new growth was coming from the neck of the tree and that it was time to prune all the old branches back to the trunk. This was hard. It was not pretty as it was, but at least it was in a shape reminiscent of its initial beauty. Unready to commit to such a drastic action, I pruned everything except for one branch which contained the last remaining evidence of the tree’s original vitality. I was foolishly romanticizing that the new growth and the old branch could somehow meet up and create a pleasant shape.
Months later, I looked at the tree. It had a healthy amount of new foliage at the neck and that stupid-looking singular branch jutting out from its side. I needed to prune the whole branch if I wanted to support the new growth. With equal part reluctance and faith, I took a gardening sheer to it and let it go. There stood an unimpressive and awkward, albeit healthy, tree. It resembled a drawing a first grader might create of a stickman with hair coming straight out of the stick body. No head. No arms. It was nothing like the beautiful, fragrant full-sized topiary I had brought home from the nursery more than a year before.
Stickman lingered and activated my impatience, causing me to study the tree less frequently until, eventually, spring returned. One year after I brought it home, thankfully, it was no longer just a body and a neck; the branches had regrown. Upon the branches, new green leaves made an appearance with renewed vitality. I was content to know we were moving in a positive trajectory. However, I was disappointed that no single bud of flower appeared.
It would be a flowerless spring. Branches and leaves would have to suffice.
I held my breath as winter turned to spring, knowing another year had passed. This month, I look out the doorway and, at first glance, the tree looks about the same as a year ago. Not bad, but will there ever be flowers again?
One sunny day, in between gloomy days, I half-heartedly fertilized it. There was no need to water it as strange, wet weather patterns continue to unfold in Southern California–atmospheric rivers, flash floods, and snow-topped mountains reappearing on Easter. If the sun wishes to come out long enough to warm the tree before the heat of summer, it has the potential to be beautiful and fragrant again. It could thrive.
The other day, from my dining chair, I noticed new, light-green sprouts emerging from darker green leaves. Fertilizer, water, and heat are working and invite me to hope and watch with regularity. Now a part of my morning ritual, just as sure as my cup of coffee, I step outside onto the cold, wet patio to look. Just shy of two years since the transplant shock that resulted in apparent death and definite dormancy, I am fully engaged with renewed hope in the plight of my little tree.
This year, tucked within the light-green growth, 16 blooms are waiting to open.
Waiting, waiting, every day.
And one day, when I step downstairs to brew a cup of coffee, at least one fragrant, white bud will be waiting for me.
