Preemptive Strike

A couple years ago I was pitching a magazine idea with a group of students to one of America's largest publishing houses. It was for twentysomethings who wanted to know what the heck they were doing on their own. We were their well designed advice column. I remember the art director of some real magazine looking at us with excitement and pitching his own idea of the cover. "I can just see it. There's a woman and half the image is her in casual clothing the other half in business attire. Across the page it will say, 'You can have it all!'" I think a quiet groan echoed throughout our staff. That was exactly what we didn't want. Looking into the very near future of holding degrees and the foreboding responsibility to hold down a job, we began to think about minimalizing our schedules. We were reassessing our view of success. The interesting part was that at the time I was working nearly full time in ministry, acting as editor in chief of a budding magazine, finishing my last year of college, dating a boy who lived at least three states away, living with three amazing and loyal friends, who I liked to talk with. . . On it went and although I loved all the different parts of my life I felt more than overextended. The image I would often meditate on while running off to this meeting or the next was of me running off to one meeting or the next and subsequently lopping off limbs to lighten the load. There was more than I could handle.

I hope I've learned from that and I think I have. Coming into marriage and a new city and new church and new school, I didn't want to default in saying "I"m so busy" with no hope of ever slowing down. But the tendency is still there. Children's ministry would be a great complement to the journalism team, to babysitting to help a friend, to working just four more hours a week for that promotion, to just taking ten credits, to being married, making friends. You could construct a similar list. The difference was the preemptive strike that lopped off one activity and stopped a potential second. I look forward to being open, in my schedule in my life, for others. We want our home to be a sanctuary for people. If everyone else is running at breakneck speed I'd like to be a contact where they can slow down, think, dream. Why does my mind somehow associate the image of doing it all to Mary Tyler Moore?

I was interviewing the pastor of my church for the aforementioned journalism team. He has been on sabbatical for three months and is preparing to return. I asked him, among other things, if he got bored (he did) and then if he got lonely. He replied that it came to a point when the phone stopped ringing and the email never showed up. He knew his staff was doing fine because they raised more than $100,000 for an Advent offering. He had to reevaluate what gave him worth, because at that moment he wasn't entirely pastor or father or husband. He wasn't needed in the larger scheme of things. Where would that leave me? And in my heart I hear the echo from my morning class,"In Christ. In Christ. In Christ." And Rick emphasized not the global mission of the church but the urgency for every person to know the Gospel and that God loves them. The tendency to move faster and do more was quelled by the need to simply know God's love and our union with Christ. How interesting.