Blessed to Bless All

Shortly after college, I was living in Orlando and tried to start a career as a missionary for an organization that does literacy work in impoverished countries. For various reasons, it didn’t work out. Soon after, I fell in love with a Kansas City girl and found a job up here: worship leader for a small church plant. I moved up here with everything I owned packed in a car. For various reasons, that didn’t work out. Because I had no job, I had no insurance, so I suddenly stopped taking my psychiatric medications and tried to deal with life without them. For obvious reasons, that didn’t work out. I had to change my approach to everything, because what I thought I would have had completely dried up.

That’s such a perfect little microcosm for my life. I grew up in Hawaii, and rather suddenly, when I was 10, in the middle of a school year, we moved to a different country. We were there for a year and a half, and we moved to Florida when I was 12. My parents got divorced when I was 15. I started college at 17, which is an adjustment for anyone. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at 21, and had to figure out a lot of things. I moved to Kansas City at 23, almost immediately lost my career, and had to find a new one in web development. Since I started my new career in 2006, I’ve worked for seven different companies – mostly moving because of better opportunities, but sometimes forced to because of layoffs. Planning is a nice suggestion for me, but adapting is basic survival.

Even with all that, I consider myself lucky. I’ve never had to leave an abusive marriage and start a new life with nothing. I’ve never had a natural disaster take everything I had. I’ve never had a catastrophic financial setback. As I’m trying to rebuild everything, I’ve never been treated unfairly because of the color of my skin, my gender, my sexuality, or my gender identity. My life has been full of change, but even the many changes I have experienced have been graceful compared to what some have gone through.

What I pull from today’s passage is a need for two things: leaving gracefully and rebuilding strategically. What I’ve learned from my life is that no amount of planning or thinking will cover those things flawlessly. There are always surprises, and some of them are drastic. We may have to change cities or careers. We may lose family members or have to walk away from bad relationships. We may end up living with different people than we grew up with. We may end up becoming people we never imagined as we were growing up. They say that the only constant is change, but frankly, we don’t even know that; we may have to adjust our plans if things don’t change.

All of us have dreams, ideals, and plans. We get attached to these, and they often become our identity. I felt like I was a good person because I thought I would be a missionary, worship leader, or pastor. But when I’m a web developer? Am I still a good person? I thought I’d be in a good place when I had a good income at a large advertising agency. But when major layoffs hit and the industry shifted, am I still in a good place when I had to take a 20% pay cut? Honestly, I don’t know if I’m the good person or in the safe place that I thought, because my concepts of morality and safety were limited to what I experienced. I’m a different kind of good person and I have a different kind of safety. Sometimes, I feel like adjusting to the new situation or the new me is like moving in with a stranger – I don’t recognize myself, and I have to get to know myself again.

I don’t have a solid one-liner to wrap all of this up. Sometimes, leaving is the best thing; sometimes, rebuilding something better is the best thing. Often, we can’t know what the best thing is – we just have to do something and hope we can figure it out. Not knowing or losing what we thought we would have happen far more often than we’re comfortable with. Accepting that loss is hard, but it’s a story we see in the Bible, and in lives all around us today. If that’s you, you’re not alone. We all go through it sometimes.