Osborn Fiber Studio

Four weeks.

That was the time allotted to me, in between my last assignment due and my first day of CPE, to transition to a very different way of life. And it was a month jam packed full of transitions.

In the last four weeks I received a Master of Divinity degree, met my brand-new baby nephew T (in whom Naomi was singularly uninterested), and celebrated my college roommate’s marriage (and got to see many beloved old friends). I met Nebraska for the first time (and didn’t want to leave), I knit a cotton hat for M, I hovered over my pea plants as they put forth their first tender flowers, and I watched as my yard filled with columbine and bluebells. Fearless and fragile, cheerfully temporary. Change is happening too fast to keep up with; all I can do is take pictures and try to absorb moments as they come and go.

Tomorrow I start Clinical Pastoral Education, which is essentially a ten-week full-time chaplaincy internship. I have every reason to believe it will be deeply good and thoroughly difficult, not least because I will be separated from Naomi for ten hours a day. This hardship makes other attendant nuisances – will I have time to cook or knit or blog? – seem paltry and selfish. Naomi will be in good hands, and we’ll be all right, but you might not hear from me as much in this space. It’s a new adventure, and probably a more personal one than the internet needs to know.

It’s a good time to change. To consider what this blog will be in the future. I write and share in order to think; that is something about me that will never change. But I will change, as I figure out my calling, and as my priorities continue to align with God’s. As God sucks me deeper into reliance on him and and into self-definition by his story. As our little family learns not just to think and plan, but to do and be. So we will see. We can’t see yet, but we will see.